Posted: September 2026
There’s a 3/4 acre vineyard in the Green Valley of Russian River Valley, in the fog belt west of Sebastopol, that has never been sprayed with a fungicide. Not once, in more than sixty years. It sits on a southeast-facing slope of sandy Goldridge loam, flanked by redwoods and, in spring, by a rare native wildflower called meadowfoam. Red-tailed hawks hunt above it. In summer the fog can feel as if it’s sprinkling.
This matters because we’re in powdery mildew country. The vineyards that surround this one, some of them among the most celebrated Pinot Noir and Chardonnay plantings in California, get sprayed on a regular schedule, because they have to. Vinifera grapes don’t have the genetic tools to handle California’s fungal pressure without help. The vines on this site do, because they aren’t vinifera. They’re Baco Noir, a French-American hybrid released by François Baco in the late 1890s, a cross of Folle Blanche and an American species, Vitis riparia. Part of the plant’s ancestry comes from a wild American grape that evolved alongside the fungal diseases of this continent. Those inherited traits are a large part of why Baco can handle conditions that leave vinifera vulnerable.
Which is not a romantic fact. It’s just what happened.
I want to walk you through what farming and making this wine actually looks like over one growing season, the 2023 vintage, in particular, and then I want to tell you how the vineyard came to be here in the first place, and how it came to be in my care.
Winter and spring.
Pruning happens in January or February, in the cold, by hand. You spend the day walking the rows, making cuts, thinking about which canes to keep and which to remove completely, reading each vine as an individual. Baco Noir buds out early-ish, which means frost risk is real.
Summer. No irrigation. The vines have been dry-farmed their entire lives, which means their roots have gone deep looking for water. In a state that has spent decades pouring irrigation onto vineyards, dry-farmed vines are increasingly rare and increasingly valuable. They’re built for the climate we have. The main summer job is canopy management. Baco is a vigorous grape; left alone, it’ll produce more leaves and shoots than it should support. So you’re pulling, positioning, thinning. No sprays. Just hands in the field.
Harvest.
The 2023 vintage had one of the longest growing seasons in recent memory. We picked on a cool morning in mid-October, weeks later than usual, at [24° Brix, pH 3.2, TA 9.9 g/L], with roughly 1.25 tons off the 3/4-acre. That kind of extended hang time is a gift and a cost. The gift is complexity: longer time on the vine tends to build depth of flavor, better integration. The cost, in 2023, was significant crop loss. Birds and voles were getting ready for winter. They ate more than their share. The wildlife was here first.
The winery.
In 2023, everything went into a single fermentation. About half the fruit stayed as whole clusters: stems, berries, and all. And the rest was destemmed. No cultured yeast was added. The wild yeasts from the vineyard and the cellar did the work. For the first week, the whole clusters sat undisturbed while a carbonic-style fermentation began inside some of the intact berries, which is a slower, more delicate way to build flavor and color. After a week, we stomped the fruit, and the primary alcoholic fermentation took over.
This part is worth pausing on. Baco Noir has a distinctive winemaking personality, and it’s almost the opposite of Cabernet Sauvignon. It gives you enormous color and acidity, but not a lot of tannin. If you treat it like Cabernet: long macerations, aggressive extraction, you get harsh phenolics without any structural payoff. The right approach, I’ve come to think, is restraint. You’re not trying to pull things out of Baco. You’re trying to preserve what’s already there. The acidity, in particular, is the point. It’s what makes this wine bright and food-friendly and alive on the table. You don’t want to erase it.
Barrel and bottle.
After pressing, the wine went into neutral French oak barriques — barrels that have been used enough that they no longer add strong oak flavor. About six months of aging. A single 30 ppm sulfur addition after malolactic fermentation. Racked once, just before bottling. Unfined. Unfiltered. It finished at [X% alcohol, pH X, TA X g/L].
That’s the wine.
The vineyard was planted in the mid-1960s by an Italian immigrant named Domenico Callegari, who worked full-time at the landfill in San Francisco and needed a grape he could put in the ground and mostly leave alone. He knew Baco Noir from his hometown in Italy, where it had been planted during the years hybrids were gaining ground across Europe. Sentimental and practical at once. He made wine at home for his neighbors and the surrounding blocks. For nearly sixty years, this was just neighborhood wine. It was never commercial.
I took over farming it in the spring of 2019, when the man who had been tending it, John Dierke, was ready to hand it off. John was farming organic Pinot Noir and Syrah nearby for Radio-Coteau, where I was working at the time. He used to mention the Baco Noir vineyard the way you’d mention a project in the garage. It was a side thing. Nobody in California wine took it seriously. He had tried to pass it off to other farmers for years and no one wanted it. When I told him I was getting curious about American grapes and hybrids, he said, essentially: please, take it. He was thrilled that somebody in California was interested in Baco Noir.
That spring, the vineyard had been pruned and that was it. Everything after was up to me.
The 2023 Rebel is a specific object, a bottle of wine you can pour, taste, and either enjoy or not. But it’s also the accumulated result of a lot of small decisions made by different people over a lot of years. Domenico’s decision, in 1965, to plant something practical for his life. John’s decision to keep the vineyard going for decades when almost no one cared about it. His decision, in 2019, to pass it on. My decision, that first spring, to accept it without really knowing what I was getting into. The decisions I’ve made every year since: when to pick, how much stem to include, when to press, when to bottle. Most of which have been experiments, some of which have been mistakes.
The wine is what’s left after all of that. It’s a physical record of attention paid over a long time by a small number of people, most of whom were not paid well for it, one of whom worked at the SF landfill and made wine for his neighbors.
I still donate some cases back to the neighborhood around the vineyard every year, because that’s what was done here for sixty years before I showed up, and there’s no reason to stop.
That 3/4-acre is the reason North American Press exists. It’s the wine that gave me the courage to start. Everything the project has become since, the Catawba we brought back to California after a sixty-year absence, the Lenoir on volcanic soils in Lake County, the wild grapes now being propagated in Sonoma, the whole beyond-vinifera argument, all of it began with the improbable fact of a vineyard nobody in California wine thought was worth taking seriously, farmed by an Italian immigrant who wasn’t trying to prove anything, handed off by a man who was ready to let it go.
I wrote this piece because the vineyard deserves to be described. Most of what makes it interesting is not the wine. It’s the fact that it exists at all.
Until next time,
Matt Niess