Our Story

After years toiling in the tech industry, I decided to take the leap and follow a passion, wine. My interest in wine started as a student at Cal Poly in the 80s. While most of my wine choices were between a $2 Soave Bolle and Hearty Red Burgundy, the local supermarkets stocked good, then undiscovered local wine. As a student in France, I did my best to try as many wines as my liver could take. Since then, my palate and budget has expanded. In the early 90’s, I sold Burgundies, German wine and South African wine. The unfortunate outcome of that is that I developed a taste or expensive Burgundies which I generally couldn’t afford.

 

It is fitting that my first vintage is a terroir driven (more on that later) Pinot Noir from the lofty misty King Ridge above the Sonoma coast. Getting into the business was just a vague idea until my winemaker neighbor had a chance to buy some really nice grapes from the Fort Ross Seaview AVA. A week later we were up in the vineyard at 5 am donning headlamps and picking grapes. Under the tutelage of winemaker Ashley Herzberg, we created a subtle medium bodied Pinot reminiscent of the Savigny-les-Beaune I used to sell.

​

Before the Pinot aficionados, before Russia and Mexico, before 49ers (both of them); the Kashaya people inhabited the Fort Ross-Seaview area. The name Tomaq derives from the Kashaya word for fog. For more information about the Kashaya visit the Fort Ross Conservancy