Peterson Winery

Peterson Winery is located on Dry Creek Road just north of Healdsburg, in the famous Dry Creek Valley of Sonoma County, California. For those of you who aren’t familiar with the geography of Northern California, Healdsburg and the Dry Creek Valley are about 75 miles north of San Francisco, and 15 miles from the Pacific Ocean coastline.

Peterson Winery grew out of the vineyards that now supply it with grapes. That may seem unusual, but our background is not just in winemaking, but also in grape growing, or viticulture. For us, making great wine is about the grapes – where and how they were grown, what the weather conditions were, and how the vineyards were managed during the growing season.

Winemaker Jamie Peterson

I’ve been helping my father at the winery since I was 12, back to the days of labeling each bottle by hand (watch out for those mid-1990’s crooked labels…). I actually grew up in the vineyards and cellar. I worked two harvests here at the winery in 2000 and 2001, the 2001 harvests Down Under in Australia at Lowe Family Winery and then in New Zealand, at Ngatarawa Winery. With this solid base of experience, much to my excitement I was given the opportunity of taking over winemaking duties at Peterson Winery in June 2002, and I’ve been loving it ever since.

Overseeing the quality of the wine from when the grapes come in all the way through to the bottle is my main responsibility and priority. Since it’s a pretty small staff here this keeps me pretty busy, but when I’m not checking up on barrels or wrestling with the bottling equipment, you can often find me at one of the numerous tasting events we attend, whether it is for charity or for the love of wine.

My winemaking philosophy follows that of my father- great wine is about place, and time/vintage, not about how much the winemaker can change a wine to suit a certain style. I continue a low tech/high touch approach here, with the only major changes from the methods of my father being sanitation practices (use of steam cleaning for water conservation, etc.) and an adoption of a “gravity-flow” handling of the fruit.

Vineyard Notes

The grapes for Peterson wines are grown in small, traditionally farmed vineyards, primarily in the Dry Creek Valley. Though each vintage varies from year to year due to weather factors, the vineyard locations remain the same. And since all Peterson wines originate from the same small plantings, there is a true consistency of place that is reflected in our wines.

Making great wines is all about balance.

It starts in the vineyards, where we try to achieve a balance from bud break in the spring until the grapes are picked in the fall. Balancing the canopy, the crop load, the sun exposure, the hang time, and the hundred other details involved in managing a vineyard are what need to be considered to achieve balance.

Once the grapes are picked, it is then the winemaker’s responsibility to continue the balancing act in the cellar. All the variables that Mother Nature gave us during the growing season need to be considered because they affect the grapes and the approach to winemaking for that vintage. If you keep a good handle on the growing conditions of the season, you have fewer preconceived notions of what the wine should taste like because you’ve already been dealing with all the realities of that vintage.

At Peterson Winery we practice the philosophy of Zero Manipulation.

Our definition of Zero Manipulation is using the gentlest winemaking techniques possible to maximize flavors, aromatics and the original essence of the wine. The less you do in the course of a wine’s tenure in the cellar, the more of the grape’s and vineyard’s essence you’ll have to bottle.