Gideon Beinstock and Saron Rice founded Clos Saron in 1999, but the story goes back much further than that. There is an excellent piece by Esther Mobley in the SF Chronicle that goes deep into the history and I highly recommend looking it up. But the short version is that Gideon and Saron met at the Fellowship of Friends headquarters in Oregon House, California. The Fellowship is a spiritual/religious movement that was founded in Berkeley in the late 1960's. It was at one time a worldwide movement with over 2500 members. Now there are around 500 members and it's reputation is one of a failed cult with a sullied history.

But in the 80's and 90's it was a vibrant community of seekers looking for fulfillment and meaning; and Oregon House was it's headquarters. One of the many cultural activities practiced at the headquarters was viticulture. (The Fellowship focused on the arts and culture as a means of self discovery. Gideon was a painter in Paris when he discovered the Fellowship.) They planted acres and acres of vines and founded a winery called Renaissance. Eventually Gideon would come to be in charge of the winery. During his tenure in the early 1990's, Renaissance produced some legandary wines that are just now reaching their prime. In the later nineties, the Fellowship began to fail. There were accusations of sexual misconduct and many members left after 1998 came and went without the fullfillment of a major doomsday prediction. Gideon and Saron were mentally and spiritually diverging from the Fellowship as well, but the vineyard held them tight. Gideon was entrenched in the land and what it had to say through the vines. But eventually they had to find a way forward that was not on the Renaissance property. This way came via a small property very nearby where, in 1995, they first began helping a friend with his .5 acres of grapes and then eventually bought the land and grew it to the 6 acres that it is today. When they started, the property was planted to Cabernet Sauvignon, but Gideon and Saron grafted the original vines over to Pinot Noir and then doubled the planting density by planting own rooted vines between the original rows. For years they were using fruit from this Clos Saron site and also fruit from Renaissance. But the need to disentangle from the Fellowship meant that they lost the access to Renaissance in 2010.

The Pinot Noir vines at Clos Saron are The Home Vineyard. They also have a field blend that will become a white blend - all harvested and fermented together. Clos Saron sits at 1600 feet elevation and all of the vines are own rooted except for those original 400 vines that were grafted from Cabernet, which are not on rootstock, but rather Pinot vines on Cabernet roots. Further down the road, on a rolling hilltop at higher elevation but exposed to much more sunshine, Gideon was farming another site that is planted to Syrah and Viognier. The grapes here were again picked together and cofermented. The last year they farmed this site was 2020.

Farming at all of the sites is organic. Gideons number one goal and the thing that he comes back to over and over again in conversations about farming or winemaking is to allow the vineyards to speak. This means not using any chemical inputs to alter that voice. It means picking at the absolute right moment to find the most clarity in that voice. And it means allowing the wine to develop as naturally as possible so as to not alter the pitch or tone of the voice. In the winery this has been an experiment in progress over the years. Every vintage brings new challenges of course, but he has found that a little sulfur at crush is the best way to avoid the characteristics he feels interfere and muffle the vineyard (like mousiness) and still allow the full range to be heard. Otherwise there are no additions at all and no fining or filtering before bottling by gravity.

Pinot Noir is the pièce de résistance of Clos Saron. I have heard Gideon speak about the project and this grape on numerous occasions, and I am not sure if this particular grape was chosen because it is so challenging, or because it offered the best opportunity to hear what this piece of ground had to say or becaue it seemed best suited to the climate and terroir. Perhaps some combination of all three. Regardless, the methodology of buidling this wine and vineyard is impressive. Planted in 1979,1980 and 1999 with as many clones as they could find all on their own rootstock. Irrigation is used very sparingly. Strictly organic farming with natural fertilizer (ie animals in the vines) and organic compost.
The grapes were picked in multiple passes through the vineyard. All fruit was foot stomped with 100% whole cluster. The wine spent 15 months in old barrels before bottling. One small sulfur addition at bottling on this wine.

+Technical Details

VARIETIES: Pinot Noir
VINEYARDS: 2.5 Acre Home Vineyard at Clos Saron Vineyards in Sierra Foothills at 1600 feet elevation. It is northeast facing on a gentle slope. Soils are clay-loam over fractured granite and volcanic ash. Vines are 3x6 spacing.
VINE AGE: 10 to 30 years old
FARMING: Organic. Very little irrigation.
WINEMAKING: Harvest with multiple passes. All grapes foot stomped whole cluster. 7 to 14 days fermentation. 15 months in nuetral barrels. 30 ppm SO2 at bottling.