Amista Vineyards

Sparkling Syrah — The wine that started it all, a dry, raspberry-hued sparkler Vicky calls ‘joy in a bottle.’

Blanc de Blanc — Estate Chardonnay in the traditional method; its debut won gold at the North Coast Wine Challenge.

Sparkling Mataró — A rare sparkling made from one hundred percent Mourvèdre.

Tres — Mike Farrow’s favorite, a Grenache–Syrah–Mourvèdre blend, made as both a still red and a sparkling.

Amista makes roughly three thousand cases a year, all estate-grown on the Morningsong Vineyard and sold direct through the tasting room and the only sparkling wine club in Dry Creek Valley.

Amista sits on Dry Creek Road just north of Healdsburg, on a twenty-acre estate the Farrows planted to Chardonnay and Syrah and named for the Spanish word for making friends. Mike and Vicky Farrow arrived in 2002 with a barrel of homemade wine they had carried from Saratoga to a New Jersey basement and back; Mike, an IBM research chemist with a doctorate in chemistry, made the first ‘Garage Syrah’ that year. What sets the place apart came later, in 2008, when Amista bottled the first sparkling wine ever made from Dry Creek Valley fruit. It has been the valley’s sparkling house ever since.

Winemaker Ashley Herzberg, who trained as a chemical engineer before a single Sonoma harvest changed her plans, joined in 2011 and turned a one-off experiment into a program of five estate sparkling wines made in the traditional method. Mike Farrow, who died in 2023, is remembered here as winemaker emeritus; his wife Vicky now leads the winery, and the estate took its first certified-organic harvest in 2024. Seated tastings run by reservation on a deck among the Morningsong vines, split between a still flight and a sparkling one. The whole sparkling program began as a favor to a college winemaking class.

Ashley Herzberg trained as a chemical engineer at the University of Nevada, Reno, with plans for medical school, until a single Sonoma harvest in a winery lab redirected her entirely. She came to Amista in 2011 as consulting winemaker and made bubbles the house signature, building a program of small-lot, single-vineyard sparkling wines in the traditional méthode champenoise alongside the estate’s Rhône reds and whites. She works with several small Sonoma family labels; at Amista, the sparkling is hers.

Vicky Farrow founded Amista with her husband Mike in 2004, the culmination of a winemaking dream that began with a single barrel of homemade Cabernet and the friends who kept raving about it — amistad, the Spanish root of the name. Mike, a doctorate chemist and former IBM researcher, made the early wines and became winemaker emeritus when Ashley Herzberg took over in 2011; he died in 2023. Vicky, the winery’s proprietor and CEO, now carries it forward, and in 2022 launched Sparkling Discoveries, an online community for sparkling-wine lovers.