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Somerston Estate Priest Ranch
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The Estate

Farming the estate and its unique vineyard blocks is the passion of our team. With each vintage, the best sites from the estate are selected to produce limited production vineyard designate wines. Our focus is to produce a world class single block Cabernet Sauvignon that reflects the unique nature of each vineyard site.

Our vineyards are comprised of multiple distinct vineyard blocks planted predominately to Cabernet Sauvignon. The property’s well-drained soils and microclimates convey the distinctive sense of place that is found in each of our wines.

We believe you can have all the elements of succcess - the land, the wine and the vision - but without the right team of people, success will remain out of reach.

Interactive Vineyard Map

Sustainability

You can have all the elements of success: the land, the wine, and the vision, but without the right team of people, success will remain out of reach.

The estate itself – with its rugged terrain, spectacular vistas, and bountiful wildlife – is the highlight at Somerston, while the winery blends into the landscape. The winery is a renovated 12,000 square-foot barn. It is a practical, efficient, and green facility with some of the most cutting-edge, innovative technology in the world. The centerpiece is an integrated, carbon-neutral CO2 heating and cooling system that operates with zero emissions of hazardous refrigerants while achieving a vastly higher performance level than traditional propane-based hot water boilers and standard refrigerant heat pumps. The system will allow the winery to produce hot water, not from propane, but electricity generated from the use of solar panels.

The next phase of the project is to construct an additional winery building with a solar roof that will make Somerston self-sufficient in energy and capable of operating entirely off the grid. The winery also employs an anaerobic process wastewater bio-filter that delivers clean, pH-adjusted water combined with irrigation water and returned to the vineyard. “Our guiding mission at Somerston is to operate systemically as a sustainable, efficient, and land-focused project,” Craig Becker says. “Plenty of wineries build efficiently, but don’t operate efficiently. There also are a lot of self-styled ‘sustainable’ wineries and vineyards that are not environmentally friendly. Every element of our winery has been designed with a purpose, and that purpose is to be truly sustainable.”