Chalk Hill AVA

Viticulture in Sonoma County dates back to the establishment of the last of the California missions, Mission San Francisco de Solano, at Sonoma in 1824. The vineyard at the mission was planted in 1825. In the late 1850s Jacob Gundlach and Count Agoston Haraszthy established major plantings of the European vine, vitis vinifera, the first such plantings in the United States. By 1855, grapes were being cultivated at Windsor, the principal town closest to Chalk Hill viticultural area. The vineyard belonged to a German immigrant named Jackson Meyers, whose lands extended into what is now the Chalk Hill district. Meyers' vines have not been identified as to variety but quite possibly were Riesling. Jackson Meyers also founded the first winery in Windsor. The Russian River Flag newspaper of Healdsburg, Ca. for September 9, 1875, described the winery as two stories, with a capacity of 75,000 gallons. Windsor gained its second winery in the year of 1875. The founder was Barney Hoen who converted an old church into a winery and added a wing to the structure. The Hoen Winery was described in the Healdsburg Enterprise of August 5, 1875 as being the second largest winery in the county!--capable of holding 200,000 gallons. Sonoma County became known nationally and internationally as a leader in the production of California premium wines. By 1870, the County led all other California counties in the volume of wine produced. By the 1880s, Sonoma wines were receiving awards at expositions in the United States and abroad. By the mid-1890's there were a half dozen wineries located in the Windsor area and 43 vineyards. Vineyard plantings and the number of wineries increased steadily into the Twentieth Century. In 1919, there were 700 bonded wineries in California, of which 256 were in Sonoma County and 120 in Napa County until Prohibition when wineries closed and vineyards uprooted and converted to grow other crops. Following the Repeal, there were 160 bonded wineries in California and only a handful in Sonoma County. The reason Sonoma's viticulture suffered greatly during Prohibition and the Great Depression was that the vineyards and wineries were, for the most part, very small family enterprises which did not possess the capital to survive. During the subsequent years until the early 1960s, Sonoma County wines lost much of their former renown because wineries turned heavily to the production of bulk jug wines which did not bear their own labels. ==Terroir==

Geography Chalk Hill possesses geographical features which distinguish its viticultural features from the surrounding areas based on climate, soil type, and other geographical features. The elevations of over 95 percent of the land in Chalk Hill range from to approximately compared with elevations on the floor of the Russian River Valley of just over or under . The predominant vineyard plantings in the AVA are at elevations ranging from . These plantings are on lands which are gently rolling to steep and which can be described as benchlands, tablelands and hills. There are numerous tillable hill "islands" and peninsulas. The area overlooks the Russian River Valley to the west and the Santa Rosa Plain to the south. Many of the vineyards which replanted on the steeper slopes are contoured and terraced. The geological strata of the Chalk Hill viticultural area, from the lower to the higher elevations, consists of open meadows with vegetation being native grasses, the brushlands of chaparral, then timberlands consisting of several species of native Oak. Throughout the AVA, there is evidence of volcanic debris, including giant stone crystals which formed into octagonal shapes as they cooled from molten lava to stone. It is across this terrain that vineyards are planted on meadowlands, slopes and hills which are not too steep to cultivate. ==References==