Flowers Vineyard & Winery

The cellar reads from the ridge

At the bench, Chantal Forthun keeps Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in close conversation as Director of Winemaking at Flowers Vineyard & Winery in Cazadero. Her work here belongs to the far Sonoma Coast, where Camp Meeting Ridge and Sea View Ridge sit on coastal ridges above the Pacific, close enough for maritime weather to become part of the method. The house began producing Chardonnay and Pinot Noir in 1989, after Walt and Joan Flowers established two ranches on the True Sonoma Coast. Those ranches now total 648 acres, planted primarily to Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, with Pinot Meunier held to a smaller place in the estate picture.

Forthun arrived at Flowers as a harvest intern in 2012, after laboratory and enology work at Oak Ridge Winery in Lodi, assistant winemaker and enologist work at Bonny Doon Vineyard in Santa Cruz, harvest at Quartz Reef in Central Otago, and a senior harvest internship at Rhys Vineyards in Los Gatos. Since 2016, she has directed winemaking here. The lineage is technical without becoming schematic: measurement first, then repetition, then judgement. At Flowers, that judgement turns on restraint, texture, and the degree to which the vineyard remains legible once the wine leaves the cellar.

Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and coastal pressure

The program is narrow by design. Camp Meeting Ridge Estate carries Pinot Noir and Chardonnay; Sea View Ridge Estate is planted to Pinot Noir, with one block of Pinot Meunier. The house does not ask the cellar to perform breadth. It asks it to stay with the coastal material long enough for difference to show, ridge by ridge, variety by variety, vintage by vintage.

Forthun’s frame for the wines is minimal intervention, but not absence of work. More hands are involved, not fewer, because quiet cellar work still requires decisions at the right moment. Since the 2011 vintage, the wines have been described by the winery as made without additives or fining agents, and without animal products in the winemaking. That detail matters because it names a discipline rather than an aesthetic. Camp Meeting Ridge Chardonnay is the signature reading of that discipline, a wine built to carry the Sonoma Coast through line, architecture, tone, and persistence without covering the site in cellar voice.

A tasting room apart from the ranches

The estate belongs to the remote coastal mountains near Timber Cove and Cazadero, but the guest house sits separately near Healdsburg. House of Flowers gives the wines a quieter stage than the ranch road itself: seated, guided, and arranged around Pinot Noir and Chardonnay rather than motion through a busy bar. The mood is measured. A host leads the tasting, the room leaves space between pours, and the wines return the conversation to the coast even when the Pacific is not in view.

That separation is useful. The vineyards can remain working ground, while the tasting room becomes a place to attend to what those ridges have made. The cellar, the house, and the two ranches all point back to the same material question: how much of Camp Meeting Ridge can remain in Camp Meeting Ridge Chardonnay.