Our Goals
From the earth to the bottle on your table, each step of a wine’s journey I find enthralling, and I have the pleasure and the privilege of being directly involved with each, from pruning through suckering, harvesting, sorting, blending and bottling.
My Story
How I came to own this property is a very long, existential story, one with which I won’t bore the reader (that’s what the blog is for). Figuratively speaking, it sold itself to me. Its conspicuous suitability for viticulture — lightly forested, fast-draining hillsides tilting westward — helped decide my new career path. From the outset, Sonoma’s affable wine community proved marvelously welcoming. The region boasts numerous well-established professionals who generously offered valuable advice to the neophyte. The small scale of the operation made some formative tasks possible for a single person, some of which I’m glad I’ll never have to repeat (such as rolling boulders to the vineyard perimeters hand over hand because I didn’t have a wheelbarrow). We planted in 2008. Our first harvest was in 2011. One year we crazily overcropped; in another we barely salvaged quickly-desiccating clusters through the timely installation of shade netting. Every vintage instructs. Every month brings specific tasks in the vineyards or in the winery. Eventually, experience, plus help from dedicated people, begins to put one — me — more and more in front of the foreseeable vicissitudes of Nature.
And for that reason, and given Star Crest’s blessed location, manageable size and unique terroir, I have no excuse for ultimately producing anything less than a world class Syrah. I rely on the expertise of two outstanding, equally committed individuals, my vineyard manager and my winemaker. I trust the finished product conveys my zeal, as well as my dedication to constant improvement, and that above all it gives you enjoyment.
The Proprietor
Philip Schlecht
The vineyards I have planted on this hillside represent the best thing I have ever done with my life. The vines live and thrive. I regret only coming to this endeavor in middle age instead of, say, my twenties. In those days, alas, I made a living on the margins of tech, but then, as now, I cultivated an avid, ever burgeoning interest in wine, eventually with an unabashed bias towards all things French. From Berkeley and later in San Francisco I made frequent treks up to the vaunted and bucolic Wine Country, which seemed to a young man from the suburbs a balmy, sweet smelling Elysium. In 2006 I had the opportunity to move here, and I did.
From the earth to the bottle on your table, every step of a wine’s journey I find engaging if not invigorating, and I have the pleasure and the privilege of being directly involved in every one of them, from pruning through suckering, harvesting, sorting, blending and bottling.
The Winemaker
I am fortunate to have the knowledge, energy and resourcefulness of Sonoma native Jess Wade in this enterprise. At half my age with a hundred times my experience, he drives not just the actual winemaking at harvest and beyond but a whole spectrum of vineyard decisions throughout the year. The list of wineries he has worked for, both tiny and massive, domestic and in the antipodes, is impressive, and now he has just launched his own label, Topophilia, committed to everybody’s favorite “heartbreak grape,” Pinot Noir. Jess is a rising star, and Star Crest would languish without him.