Williams Selyem began as a hobby in the late 1970s when two friends, Burt Williams (a San Francisco pressman) and Ed Selyem (wine buyer for Speer's Market in Forestville), started making wine in a leased two-car garage on River Road in Fulton. Their first labels, in 1979, read Hacienda del Rio (later changed to Williams Selyem in 1984), and they sourced from the best vineyards in the Russian River (Rochioli, Allen, Olivet Lane, Hirsch) and made wine in tiny lots with whole-cluster fermentation, native yeasts, no fining or filtration. The wines won critical acclaim, and the mailing list became famously hard to crack; by the early 1990s Williams Selyem had a multi-year waiting list and was widely regarded as the benchmark for American Pinot Noir.
Russian River Valley Pinot Noir: the flagship appellation blend and the ideal introduction to the house style.
Allen Vineyard Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley: first released in 1988; silky and red-fruited, one of the longest-standing bottlings.
Rochioli Riverblock Pinot Noir, Russian River Valley: darker and brooding, from the legendary vineyard whose 1985 bottling made the winery famous.
Westside Road Neighbors Pinot Noir: a prized blend of top Russian River sites along Westside Road.
Russian River Valley Zinfandel: an old-vine, single-vineyard Zin nodding to Burt Williams's early garage experiments.
In 2001 the winery acquired its estate on Westside Road, near the Allen Ranch building where grower Howard Allen had offered space in 1988, across the road from Rochioli, and commissioned a new winery there; in 2025 it added a production facility near downtown Healdsburg. Bob Cabral was winemaker from 1998 to 2014, and Jeff Mangahas, who succeeded him, is only the third person to hold the role in five decades. The portfolio still focuses on single-vineyard Pinot Noir from a roster of grower partnerships across Russian River, Sonoma Coast, and Anderson Valley, along with Zinfandel and Chardonnay. About 95 percent is sold directly to members of the WS List, some 2,800 of whom have been on it for more than 25 years, and its waiting list runs from a few months to about a year; members visit by appointment for unhurried library tastings, and non-members are welcomed when space opens.
