Donum Estate on Track to Becoming Sonoma County's Second Largest Organic Vineyard Owner

Donum Estate, a high end Pinot Noir producer in the Carneros, is on its way to becoming Sonoma County's second largest organic vineyard owner. Now in its second year of using only organic farming practices, the estate is anticipating organic certification with CCOF in 2022.

The winery's organic vineyards, based mainly in the Carneros, also put it on track to become the largest organic vineyard on the Sonoma side of the Carneros.  

The 190 acre estate in the Carneros is home to 121 acres of planted vines on two vineyards. 

Additionally the winery has a 16 acre vineyard in the Russian River Valley and a newly acquired and newly planted 20 acre vineyard site in Bodega, adjacent to Benziger's de Coelho vineyard near Freestone.

The county's biggest organic vineyard owner, Ridge Vineyards, has vines in the hot inland Dry Creek Valley and Geyserville AVAs. There it grows Zinfandel and Rhone varieties on its 288 acres of organic vines.

In contrast, Donum Estate is in the cool climate Pinot growing regions. 

The country's other large organic producer, Benziger, has 100 acres in various Sonoma AVAs, including Sonoma Mountain, Sonoma Valley, the Russian River Valley and the Sonoma Coast.

Increases Organic Carneros Acreage 

Other local, all organic estate wineries in the Carneros that have organic vineyards in the region include Adastra, Crazy Flower, Grgich Hills Estate, Madonna Estate, Robert Sinskey Vineyards and ZD Wines, all on the Napa side. Larson Family Winery and Nicholson Ranch on the Sonoma side make some wines from certified organic estate vines in the Carneros.

Donum: An Arty Destination

Donum is popular with visitors for its wide range of Pinot Noir wines, made in varying styles, along with its world class collection of 40 outdoor sculptures. Its most famous is Zodiac by Ai Weiwei. 

Mei and Allan Warburg

Owners Allan and Mei Warburg have collected sculptures from leading international artists over years of living in China. (See Christie's article about their collecting here).

Allan Warburg was recently a guest on a YouTube video with Jean-Charles Boisset, talking about his life and collecting art. Here's that interview:

WINEMAKER INTERVIEW: DAN FISHMAN

Why did you and the team at Donum decide to go organic?

Mostly it's a wine quality thing. But there are a lot of good reasons independent of wine quality, as well.

I'm trying to kind of reduce the number of impacts that, that I have as winemaker and trying to use as light a touch as possible.

How are the vineyards doing this year during the conversion?

I've already seen our Carneros soils–which is our biggest vineyard by far–doing better despite the drought. 

Here in the Carneros we have soils with pretty heavy clay content. Outside the vineyard, the soils are cracking. 

We never saw insects or worms in there before. Now there's tons of life and worm castings everywhere. 

The soil is holding water a lot better and holding its structure much better. 

The feeling of being in the vineyard has changed a lot, too. We're just seeing so much more life and energy in the place. We're starting to see a big improvement on that front.

What's it like implementing a composting program?

Doing our own compost is really cool, too. 

We also opened our estate winery in 2019, so now all of our must and vine cuttings goes into building our own compost. We are taking that a step further with some biological additions. 

Are you also using some biodynamic practices?

We also started working with a biodynamic consultant and we can already see in the vineyard how some of the compost teas and the biodynamic horn manure (BD 500) has really brought a lot of life back to those soils. 

How have the workers responded to the conversion project?

I think our vineyard team really does love the fact that they don't have to get into all that protective equipment to do sprays. I think they feel just safer and happier working in a healthier place.