Blue Farm

Anne Moller-Racke came to California from Germany in 1981 to work a single harvest at Buena Vista and never went home. She spent the next two decades farming some of Carneros's most respected vineyards, helped establish the Carneros Wine Alliance, and in 2001 co-founded The Donum Estate, the property that would become one of California's most distinctive Pinot Noir producers and home to one of the world's largest private sculpture collections. That same year, she planted seven acres of Pinot Noir behind her own 1880s Victorian farmhouse three miles south of Sonoma Plaza, dividing the Anne Katherina Vineyard into four blocks designed to assemble into one complete wine.

In 2019, Moller-Racke stepped away from Donum to focus on Blue Farm full-time. The project has expanded from its single home vineyard into Burgundian grand-cru-style Pinot Noir and Chardonnay drawn from five Sonoma vineyards across five AVAs (Carneros, Sonoma Valley, Russian River Valley, Fort Ross-Seaview, and the Sonoma Coast), each made in tiny quantities (often 250 cases or less). Moller-Racke makes the wines herself in a deliberately restrained register; the wines are sold almost entirely through the Guaranteed Allocation Program. Tastings are private and by appointment, held in a vineyard-edge greenhouse set in a rose garden with views east to the Mayacamas. Blue Farm is also notable as an entirely women-led winery, a deliberate choice by Moller-Racke and her daughter Hannah Gropman, who has driven the move to fully organic farming with biodiversity built into the estate.