Donelan Family Wines

This is our second time visiting Donelan Family Wines… and the second time I’ve forgotten to take a photo of the entrance. (Sorry!) Their tasting room is located in a Santa Rosa office park; not your usual idea of wine tasting, I know, but we’ve found that these locations are often hiding some of the best wines.

They’ve actually done a lot to make their tasting room cozy and classy. There’s a great wood table with Chilewich placemats, a clipboard with personalized tasting menus, and quality glass. There’s also color-coded maps of the region, soil samples, and everything else enomaniacs go gah gah over. The real magic, though, goes on behind the large sliding barn doors.

We visited during harvest, so we actually got to see the winemaker up on a ladder checking out the bladder press. There was another girl up on top of a fermentation tank pressing down the cap. We even got to meet the stars of the show: the recently picked grapes, popping and fizzing in their containers. “You’re going to be amazing wine!” I told them, because at Donelan, there’s no doubt these grapes will make an impression.

Donelan doesn’t make a bad bottle, but they are a Syrah house at heart. We went with the Portfolio Tasting for $30pp, but our concierge traded out things on the original menu for things we had tasted and bought at our last appointment as well as a few things he thought we might like. Our favorites of the 2014 vintage were the Obsidian, the Richards Family Vineyard and the Cuvée Keltie.