15-05-2025
- Business
- San Francisco Chronicle
Why this top California winery raised its tasting fee to $90
Every year, when I fact-check the tasting fees for my Top Sonoma County Wineries guide — whose annual update we published today — I expect prices to have inched upward. There's inevitably a handful of wineries that have raised tasting fees modestly, say from $30 to $35. In this economy, who can blame them?
But I jolted when I noticed that the price to visit one of my favorite Sonoma County spots, Hanzell Vineyards, had spiked dramatically, from $65 a year ago to $90 now. I will ride any day for Hanzell, which produces not only some of the greatest but also some of the most historically significant California Chardonnay. However, I could already imagine the emails I would receive from you, my dear readers. There's no question about it, $90 is a lot for a wine tasting.
So I called Hanzell president and director of winemaking Jason Jardine to ask about the change. The winery is not trying to gouge its customers, I can report. Instead, Hanzell has changed the nature of its experience to reflect the changing nature of its visitors.
The last time I visited Hanzell, I had a lovely tasting at an outdoor table, overlooking the lush organic vineyards. An employee tended to my party intermittently to pour wine but mostly left us alone. That was the old way. Now, before sitting down at a scenic perch to taste, everyone gets a tour of the caves, vineyards and, most important, the original Hanzell winery, which has been converted into a museum.
'We literally have it set up as it was when it was built in 1956 and 1957,' said Jardine. In the years since they moved winemaking into a more modern facility on the property, Hanzell kept the old winery intact, and now they've made it museum-like by adding educational materials like plaques. In general, winery tours can feel punishingly repetitive, but if any can make the case for a distinctive one, it's probably Hanzell.
When owner James Zellerbach and winemaker Brad Webb started out in the '50s, they set off a quiet revolution in California winemaking. They were (by their own account, since bolstered by the history books) the first winery in the world to use stainless steel tanks, the first to implement temperature control for fermentations, the first to use a hydraulic basket press and the first in California to use exclusively French oak barrels.
Each of these firsts was significant, especially for white wines, which had a knack for developing off-flavors when fermented at hot temperatures. Keeping them cool retained their delicate aromatic compounds. Stainless tanks prevented the bacterial contamination that could arise in the redwood vessels that were standard at the time. Along with other practices that Webb instated — blocking malolactic conversion in some of the Chardonnay; pre-oxidizing the juice before fermentation — these allowed Hanzell to produce a white wine that was unusually crisp, clean and bright for its era. They turned out to age beautifully too.
When Jardine joined Hanzell 13 years ago, most visitors to the winery — 'that old-school wine collector,' he said — were familiar with this story. But today's Hanzell visitors skew younger, and they have no idea. It seemed like a wasted opportunity, Jardine said, to not take them through the old winery, and explain the organic farming approach, 'versus just having them sit down and look at the view.' (The view is pretty great.)
The $90 tasting fee may signal to some prospective visitors the seriousness of the endeavor, and it also accounts for the fact that winery employees now host only one group at a time, as opposed to the multiple parties they juggled in the past.
Some wine industry players will argue that intimate, one-on-one tasting experiences like this one tend to result in higher wine sales. Hanzell hasn't really borne out that theory. Plenty of folks are still joining the wine club, Jardine said: Since starting the tours, the winery is by definition seeing fewer visitors, but its monthly wine club conversion rate is steady. Overall wine sales 'are about the same, if not down.'
He chalks that up to a fundamental change in how people interact with wineries. 'The Baby Boomer generation, the wine collectors, we'd see them buy a case of each thing they tasted,' said Jardine. 'I don't know if we're going to see that again.' Younger wine drinkers, even those with disposable income, don't fancy themselves collectors. No one has a cellar anymore.
Still, Jardine said that the shift to tours has been rewarding. He sees people react not only to Hanzell's history but to its farming philosophy and its rejection of synthetic chemicals. 'We may not be seeing as many people leaving here with five cases in their trunk,' he said, 'but maybe we are building a deeper longterm connection. And when they see our wine in a restaurant later, they know what we are about.'
