Bacigalupi Vineyards

Ashley Herzberg set out to be a doctor (earning a chemical engineering degree at the University of Nevada, Reno, and working four years in a hospital) before a harvest in Sonoma changed her course. She began as a lab technician at Owl Ridge Wine Services, rising to lab manager and learning from Pinot Noir luminaries like Merry Edwards and Greg La Follette, then became enologist and assistant winemaker at Mauritson. Now a consulting winemaker, she has crafted Bacigalupi's wines since the label's revival, making its inaugural 2011 Chardonnay and every vintage since. She works with a fourth-generation grape-growing family whose Westside Road fruit famously went into the 1973 Chardonnay that triumphed at the 1976 Judgment of Paris. Bringing a scientist's rigor and a minimal-intervention touch, Herzberg lets the historic Russian River Valley vineyards speak across Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, Zinfandel, and Petite Sirah.

John Bacigalupi has farmed his family’s Westside Road vineyards his whole life. His parents, Charles (a dentist) and Helen (a pharmacist), bought the Goddard Ranch in 1956 and in 1964 planted the Wente-clone Chardonnay block whose fruit went into Chateau Montelena’s 1973 Chardonnay, the white that triumphed at the 1976 Judgment of Paris. John worked the vines alongside his father and famously delivered those grapes in the family’s VW pickup. He still tends the historic Paris Tasting Block, among California’s oldest Chardonnay vines, while a new generation of Bacigalupis now carries the family label forward.