Anderson Valley’s earliest harvest meets its oldest problem: Visibility

Islands and Valleys is a monthly tour of Mendocino County’s American Viticultural Areas. This is the second stop.

MENDOCINO CO., 8/21/2026 — Zac Robinson stopped at the end of a vine row on Monday, July 27, and pointed at a cluster turning from green to purple. Veraison, the last color change before harvest, was nearly done. Picking at Husch Vineyards was maybe three weeks out. The valley’s sparkling grapes would go first. 

“Everybody in Sonoma, everybody over by Ukiah says the harvest is running two, three weeks early,” Robinson said. “I’ve never seen a year like this.” 

The 2026 vintage is shaping up as the earliest the valley growers say they’ve seen. Doug Stewart, board president of the Anderson Valley Winegrowers Association, called it “a record-breaking vintage in terms of how early it is” in mid-July, and expected sparkling picking to start in the first days of August. Robinson’s explanation is less alarming than the calendar suggests: “It’s been such a Goldilocks year. We didn’t have any really hot days that stunt growth. We didn’t have any cold periods that stunt growth. Everything has been warm, just constantly warm. It’s like we’ve been driving down the freeway at 65 miles an hour without stopping to go pee or stopping to get a snack — and so you end up getting there a little bit faster.” 

Anderson Valley is the Mendocino County appellation the outside world knows best — 57,600 acres of the Navarro River watershed, a federal viticultural area since Aug. 18, 1983, and, in Robinson’s words, “frankly, world-renowned for its pinot noir production and increasingly for its sparkling production.” It’s also tiny: about 2,500 acres of actual vines, by Robinson’s count. That gap — big reputation, small patch of ground — runs through everything the valley’s growers, winemakers and tasting-room owners are doing this year, in a season arriving faster than any they can remember. 

The accidental pinot capital 

The valley came late to wine. For a century, it grew grapes “kind of hobby-ish,” Robinson said, on land subsistence farmers had cleared from redwood forest to run sheep and grow winter barley. Commercial vineyards arrived in the 1960s, when Tony and Gretchen Husch moved here, planted vines and, in 1971, opened the valley’s first winery. Neighbor Edmeades followed a year later. 

Robinson credits the founders with three good decisions: They chose Anderson Valley, they hired vineyard manager Al White — who retired last year, after 50 years in the same vineyard — and they planted pinot noir. That last one was luck. “They made a random choice to plant pinot noir, mostly because all the other red grapes weren’t ripening up in this valley,” Robinson said. “That was magical, because pinot noir is now the foundation of what Anderson Valley is.” 

It wasn’t always. “Gewürztraminer was the foundation of this valley — economically, everyone made money on their gewürztraminer,” Robinson said. “The first 10 years, we could successfully grow pinot noir and get it ripe and make wine, but kind of had a hard time selling the wine.” The two grapes have since traded places, and he isn’t sentimental about the standings: “I wouldn’t be surprised if things flipped again, because they always do in the wine world.” 

Robinson’s family bought the property from the Husch family in the 1970s — his grandfather farmed grapes in Ukiah Valley — and has run it for three generations. Before wine, the family cycled through pears, Italian prunes, apples, grain, cattle and a dairy. “The fact that we’ve gone five decades now of just wine grapes is unheard of,” he said. “And so the fact that there’s a bump in the road is no surprise at all.” 

The bump is real, even here. Anderson Valley pinot noir commands roughly double the per-ton price of pinot grown elsewhere in the county, Robinson said, and other Mendocino growers point at the valley as the one that still stands in a bruising market. He hesitates at that. “I think there’s a fair amount of pain here, too. I know there’s pinot noir vineyards that aren’t getting farmed this year,” he said. “Downturns hit people sometimes equally.” 

In the old tasting room — the valley’s first winery was a storage-shed-sized building beside the crush pad — Robinson pulled out a bottle of 1979 Husch pinot noir. The label reads “Mendocino.” It has to: Anderson Valley did not legally exist as an AVA until the federal government approved the appellation in 1983. Any local bottle older than that carries the county’s name instead of Anderson Valley. 

The economics of staying small are unforgiving. Husch’s crush equipment runs about nine days a year, Robinson said — “a big investment to sit idle 356 days” — and the wines stay deliberately old-fashioned: under 14% alcohol, less oak, restrained. “Picking late to get high-alcohol wines, it’s not very grower-friendly,” he said. “And because we’re growers, we wouldn’t do that to ourselves.” 

What keeps the valley from converting reputation into sales, he argues, is simple obscurity. “No one knows Anderson Valley. It’s too small,” he said. “You could go into a Safeway today and not find a single Anderson Valley wine.” The play left for a 2,500-acre appellation, as he sees it: “Just be exclusive — a little bit of a secret with people who know wine well.” 

The bar in Boonville 

At Foursight Wines in Boonville on Thursday, July 30, Kristy Charles poured through a list her family grows on a single vineyard — four pinot noirs, all from the estate’s Charles Vineyard, picked from different blocks and raised in different oak, every one fermented on wild yeast. “We’re trying to just let Mother Nature do her job,” she said. 

Charles reads this strange season mildly: A warm March moved bud break up, “which just shifts the season. Quality-wise, it’s no big deal.” And she reads the downturn from a position the big brands might envy. “Really small brands like us haven’t seen the effect so much, because we mainly sell through our wine club, the tasting room, online — that’s it,” she said. The danger lives in the other channel: “When distributors stop taking your wine because they can’t sell it at the restaurant anymore — that’s what happened in ’08.” 

The winery’s newest product is its least traditional: wine in cans, launched over the winter — sauvignon blanc, rosé and a chillable pinot noir. “They’ve been selling amazingly well,” Charles said. 

What the valley lacks, she said, is not wine but beds. “That’s the hardest thing — we don’t have enough lodging to give people excuses to pass by Napa and Sonoma and continue north for another hour or more.” The valley’s winegrowers association — which Charles once led, and which has run the valley’s festivals for 30 years — is itself between executive directors this summer. “Lots of change happening in the space,” she said. 

The coldest spot on the coast 

Stewart is the association’s board president and, under the bylaws, its voice to the press — a job with volume lately. The day before my visit to his Lichen Estate in Boonville, a reporter from a hedge-fund-owned chain had interviewed him about climate change. Two days before that, Stewart spent a day with Japanese wine buyers asking what makes Anderson Valley special. 

“They’re the same,” Stewart said. 

His answer starts with the ocean. “We are the coldest appellation on the West Coast, and we are sitting on the edge of the greatest heat sink in the world, the Pacific,” he said. The warm current that sometimes pushes up to San Francisco Bay or the Russian River never makes it to Anderson Valley, he said. “We have seen already significant changes in mean average temperature in Napa County and Sonoma County, even Ukiah Valley. We haven’t — the Pacific has not increased in temperature like the weather has.” 

Below the fog line, which he puts at about 900 feet, cold night air pours off the 3,500-foot ridges “like a river” and pools on the valley floor. That cold, and the valley’s huge day-night temperature swings, are the case he makes for Anderson Valley’s future while warmer regions scramble: “Ukiah today is akin to where Napa was in the 1970s — and the soils are quite similar. They just don’t get the respect.” 

The cold didn’t make 2026 easy. “It’s rough in terms of farming,” Stewart said. The season ran early and warm through bud break. April rain brought shatter to “a lot of people, including us” and, “for the first time in over a decade,” mildew pressure. May, June and July stayed cool. Lichen is dropping fruit and Stewart expects a short crop. He can afford it: “The last two or three vintages have been strong, and there doesn’t seem to be much of a market right now for grapes. We make all our own.” 

Stewart farms organically, picks his sparkling grapes lean — “our sparkling is probably as acidic as any in the U.S.” — and learned the trade from the founding winemaker of Roederer Estate. “You make wine in the vineyard,” he said, “and you don’t f— it up.” Still wine, by his lights, mostly asks for that restraint. “Sparkling, on the other hand, is not at all simple. It’s 10 times more complex.” 

Asked whether he is optimistic or pessimistic about the wine business, he didn’t pick either. “I’m gritting my teeth,” he said. The downturn cost Lichen a chunk of its wine club, the engine of its direct-to-consumer profits, before membership stabilized this year. Then he offered the counter-evidence: “Don’t ask me why, but our sales through distribution have quadrupled in the last couple of months,” he said, including interest from Costco in the current vintage of his main pinot noir. 

That evening, 50-plus growers, winemakers and sponsors were due at Lichen for the association’s twice-yearly general meeting, with an agenda Stewart had already summarized in writing: figuring out how the valley ups its game selling its own wine. 

The season wasn’t waiting for the meeting. Stewart expected sparkling picking to start within days, with bottling still to juggle alongside it — a record-early vintage landing in a corner of California that believes the changing climate is, for now, running in its favor.