We set out to find a low-maintenance weekend getaway close to San Francisco.

Instead, we fell for a farm.

In 2012, we chanced upon a neglected vineyard on Sonoma Mountain planted to Cabernet Sauvignon in the late 1990s. We were urban professionals; growing wine grapes was beyond our ken. But the site was too beautiful to resist.

So we plunged in, and rediscovered the joy of learning something completely new.

It did not take us long to realize we have excellent soil and ideal climate. We committed to make the vineyard the best it could be.

We are now proud stewards of a thriving three acre Cabernet vineyard, producing premium grapes for distinguished winemakers who fashion award winning wines.

Our vines grow at 1,250 feet in well-drained, cobbly, Goulding-Toomes soil. We are twenty miles from the Pacific, in the northern Petaluma Gap AVA and eastern Sonoma Coast AVA, uphill from Sangiacomo Roberts Road and Gap’s Crown Vineyards, across Copeland Creek from Sun Chase Vineyard. At night, temperatures drop 30+ degrees, cooling the vines, occasionally blanketing them in deep thick fog; by day, we receive abundant sunshine. This gives our grapes their distinct, tough, well balanced character.

The vineyard is at the end of a long spur off Lichau Road, which climbs the flank of Sonoma Mountain. Pioneer Henry Phillip Lichau arrived in San Francisco in 1856 from Hesse-Cassel in present day Germany. He settled on the west face of the mountain in the 1870s, where he grazed cattle and sheep until his death in 1909. His legacy endures in the name of the creek that runs through the town of Penngrove, the uphill road on which we found our farm, and our vineyard located on his former homestead.