Utopia Vineyard & Winery

Daniel Warnshuis built a career in Silicon Valley technology while living in Napa, where he opened a retail store and started spending time with growers and winemakers. Conversations with Oregon growers at the International Pinot Noir Celebration sent him looking for a vineyard site of his own. His search began in 1998; by 2000 he’d found a parcel just above the old Bergström farm on Ribbon Ridge, and soil tests confirmed what he’d suspected.

He and his wife Kathy founded Utopia Estate Vineyard in 2002. The name is what it sounds like — an imagined place where everything is perfect. They live on the property, in the big house you see turning off Ribbon Ridge Road.

The first four-acre block went in that year: six Pinot Noir clones chosen for assertive character — Dijon 115, 667, and 777, plus Pommard, Wädenswil, and Swan. Three years later came five one-acre blocks of heirloom and Old World clones propagated from old-vine cuttings taken at famous vineyards in Oregon and California, the youngest of them nearly four decades old. Further planting followed in 2010. The estate now runs roughly seventeen acres of south-facing hillside at 500 feet, on the fine marine sedimentary WillaKenzie soils that define Ribbon Ridge — twelve Pinot Noir clones and three low-yielding Dijon Chardonnay selections.

Warnshuis does essentially all of it himself. He manages the vineyard with one employee, monitors the fruit, works the hand-picked and hand-sorted harvest, makes the wine, and bottles it. Around 2,200 cases a year, dry farmed and LIVE certified since 2008. He served as president of the Ribbon Ridge Winegrowers Association. Kathy contributes behind the scenes, and their daughter Erin has run the tasting room and marketing.

Beyond the estate Pinot and Chardonnay there’s Pinot Blanc, plus Viognier and Grenache from Rogue Valley fruit grown by a friend.

The wines are sold almost entirely from the winery. If you want them, you come here.