Sanford Winery welcomes visitors to their new tasting room adjacent to their stone and adobe winery and estate vineyards at Rancho La Rinconada. The new tasting room includes a private room for small groups or educational tastings by appointment. The spacious front and back covered terraces can accommodate groups and special events, offering 360-degree views of the winery and vineyards.
The expansive tasting room is a two-story structure built, in large part, from recycled materials, including salvaged lumber from a barn in Washington State. Its facade consists of native California stone at its base and more than 15,000 handmade adobe bricks on exterior walls, the same bricks used for the La Rinconada winery, which Wine & Spirits magazine cited as one of the top examples of winery architectural design in the U.S. in 2006.
Sanford has been noted as the first grower to plant within this cool vineyard zone concentrating on producing exquisite Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Fruit for their wines comes from one of their two vineyards within the Santa Rita appellation. The unique climate has a heavy Pacific fog on summer mornings rolling eastward through the valley, holding morning temperatures in the 50's and 60's. By mid-morning, heat from the mountains pushes the marine layer back out to sea, warming the valley into the 70's and 80's.
The artwork of Sebastian Titus has been featured on the bottles of Sanford wine varietals since 1981. Each label depicts a wildflower that blossoms, in its season, in the Santa Rita Hills. Titus has designed more than 60 original wildflower paintings for Sanford's labels.
