Ryan Hodgins

Coming Up

Training at University of California, Davis put biology and table culture in the same room for Hodgins. That grounding carried into Hanzell Vineyards in Sonoma, where he worked as assistant winemaker and viticulturist from 2005 to 2009. The pairing matters: cellar work on one side, vineyard work on the other, with each informing the way the other is done. Anderson Valley became the central ground for that practice. Hodgins served as founding consulting winemaker at Breggo Cellars in Anderson Valley until 2009, then moved into the full-time winemaker role at FEL Wines, formerly Breggo Cellars, in 2009. The shift reads less like a change of direction than a tightening of focus around one region and one set of materials.

Where They Are Now

At FEL Wines in Anderson Valley, the Director of Winemaking role places Hodgins inside the daily mechanics of place-driven wine. The throughline is precision: science as a tool, instinct as a filter, and experience as the thing that lets vineyard work become coherent wine. His record is built on that kind of continuity.

Signature

Ryan's signature wines include FEL Wines 2019 Anderson Valley Pinot Gris. The wine sits squarely in the register of his approach: clear, regionally specific, and tied to Anderson Valley rather than to any attempt at spectacle.

In Their Words “I was a biology major in college, and it seemed like the natural nexus.” Those two lines point to the shape of the work: biology as a way of thinking, and cooking and gardening as early contact with season, texture, and produce. In Hodgins’s case, the technical and domestic influences converge into a winemaking sensibility that values structure, timing, and the practical knowledge of how things grow into form.