CAST Wines

Grey Palm Estate Zinfandel — The heart of the house: estate-grown, organically farmed Zinfandel off the Grey Palm hillside, the wine the property was planted for.

Old Vine Zinfandel, Watson Vineyard — From a neighboring block roughly thirty years older than the estate vines, a built-in study in what age does to Dry Creek Zin.

Estate Petite Sirah — Dark, structured, and concentrated; one of CAST’s earliest acclaimed bottlings.

Russian River Chardonnay & Pinot Noir — Cool-climate fruit brought down from the RRV, a deliberate counterpoint to the estate reds.

CAST farms its Grey Palm Estate Vineyard organically and sources Cabernet from Alexander Valley to round out a wide, exploratory portfolio of roughly 3,500 cases a year. Wines are sold largely direct, through the tasting room and club.

CAST occupies a forested bench above Dry Creek Valley, on a hillside its founders bought after a single sunset convinced them. Jack and Ann Seifrick — Ohio natives who built careers in Texas — came through on a 2011 bike trip, watched the light drop behind Bradford Mountain, and assembled some fifty friends as investor-owners to buy the property; the name marks the spell the site cast that evening. The estate Grey Palm Vineyard was certified organic, and winemaker Ashley Herzberg keeps production to roughly 3,500 cases. It is a working hillside farm first, a tasting room second.

Tastings are seated and unhurried, set on the hillside perch the winery calls its beach — a bench beneath a lone Canary Island date palm, the Grey Palm the estate vineyard takes its name from, looking down the rows toward Bradford Mountain. The standard flight, the Exploration, moves through five current releases; the Winemaker’s Perch seats private groups of up to ten above the same view. The estate fruit comes off the Grey Palm hillside, with older-vine Zinfandel from the adjoining Watson Vineyard, whose plantings predate CAST’s own by about thirty years. The pour is in no hurry.

Ashley Herzberg came to wine by way of chemical engineering — a University of Nevada, Reno degree and a plan to attend medical school that dissolved the moment she worked her first Sonoma harvest in a winery lab. She started as a lab technician at Owl Ridge, learning alongside Pinot Noir veterans including Merry Edwards and Greg La Follette, rose to enologist and then assistant winemaker at Mauritson, and launched her own consulting practice in 2011 making wine for small Sonoma family labels. She has led CAST’s winemaking since, bringing an engineer’s precision and a restless, exploratory streak to more than fifteen years in the cellar.

Jack Seifrick founded CAST in 2012 with his wife Ann and a wide circle of friends — Ohio natives who built careers in Texas before wine country pulled them west. A Harvard MBA and former Arthur Andersen accountant, Jack ran a commercial real estate business in Dallas; Ann’s background is in finance. Together they assembled an investor group of roughly fifty owners, many of them Dallas families, to buy the Dry Creek property they’d fallen for on a 2011 bike trip and hire a winemaking team. Jack still directs CAST’s long-term vision — and the winery keeps a standing welcome for visiting Texans.