This past week, I had a passing thought that I should call David Hirsch. I didn’t know he’d been ill. I just missed our long, meandering conversations. For many years, I had considered David and his wife, Marie, as friends. It was never easy to get to see them, as the Hirsch ranch was a long way from anywhere, but I did drive out Bohan-Dillon Road any number of times to visit, with one memorable overnight stay on the floor of a cabin under construction, to awaken to the Pacific and the bird song in the midst of the coastal redwoods.
So, when I say that David grew some of the most site expressive wines in California, it is partly a statement of familiarity with the place, with the ridges that provided nooks and rises for dozens of separate lots, from his coveted Block 8 to his small parcels of chardonnay. The distance from civilization may have made his project challenging or impossible if the place, and David, Marie and Jasmine, David’s daughter, had not been so magnetic in attracting talent, particularly Everardo Robledo, who managed the vineyard with David for decades.
There was nothing practical about the project. When David moved to the ridges above Fort Ross from Santa Cruz, he intended to restore the forest on his 1,000 acres of land, the retirement project of a man still full of energy and still ready for a friend’s off-hand comment to spark his imagination: After Jim Beauregard told him those ridges would be a great place to plant pinot noir, David’s dreams slowly shifted from a thousand-year forest management plan to include an annual vineyard harvest. Jim was right, as David confirmed in 1994 when he began to sell fruit to winemakers such as Burt and Ed at Williams Selyem, Steve Kistler of Kistler Vineyards, and Ted Lemon at Littorai. They all presented that fruit in Hirsch Vineyard designates, offering the first glimpses of the vinous character of David’s far-coast site. Many of the vineyard blocks thrived in the chaos of the Pacific weather, though not all, and not always. Later, the vines would become more sensitive to their site as David and his team studied biodynamic farming and learned, over years of practice, how to apply its tenets to their vineyard.
The extreme nature of that site, less than three miles from the ocean and rising 1,600 feet above it, is not what stands out in the best vintages of Hirsch pinot noir. Rather it is the strength and health of the pinot noir vines and the soils in which they grow, the delicacy they can impart in the wine.
David set out to discover a grand cru in California and to tend it to produce a wine worthy of the company it might share in Burgundy. Block 8, a parcel David first bottled commercially in 2011, stands as straight as any powerhouse California wine, yet with none of the excess muscle or fat, just a sheer, see-through-the-fruit-skin clarity to a taste that is consistent, year after year, as long as there is a harvest. Even as Burgundy gains increasing richness in a changing climate, Block 8 holds the course for now with its cold proximity to the Pacific. While the ocean is warming, it’s still cold enough to allow Hirsch’s pinot to sustain its delicacy and inner strength.
Many of the pinot noirs grown on the property show that lithe spirit and inner strength, made with the sensitive care Jasmine now brings to the wines.
As a Zen Buddhist, David embodied an old soul, one who wasn’t distracted by flashes of momentary interest. He knew his goals and he kept his sights on the horizon. Though he left this world on July 28, his spirit will live on at his vineyard by the sea. I will miss him more than I can say.
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For a sense of the wines, here are a few notes from reviews I wrote for Wine & Spirits magazine.
The 2019 Block 8, reviewed in April 2022:
The 2019 vintage, made by Jasmine Hirsch, marks the second time Block 8 has earned 96 points from this magazine, following the 2015, the last vintage made by Ross Cobb. Jasmine’s father, David, planted this block in 1993, a parcel on the western ridge of his property. He propagated cuttings from his original 1980 planting, material he’d sourced from Jim Beauregard at Felton Empire in Santa Cruz, later identified as Pommard and Wädenswil material that likely came from Oregon. Settled into a ridge high above the Pacific, those vines produced a sunny 2019 ripened to golden strawberry, cool cranberry and luxurious fresh cherry fullness. That said, it’s less about fruit than the gentleness of the herbal tannins and their oceanic sandstone embrace. David Hirsch describes this parcel as growing in reddish rock, high in iron oxide and with exceptional drainage. Between that and the heritage of the vines, when Block 8 hits, it can be brilliant.
The 2018 Reserve Pinot Noir, reviewed in April 2021:
If you close your eyes, you might feel the crash and the undertow of the sea, a present and persistent energy and motion in this wine grown within sight of the Pacific, on ridges high above the surf. That elevation captures the sun in spicy, bright fruit and builds the mineral power of the tannins, releasing their flavors in the crunch of cherry leaves and the red skin of some as-yet-undiscovered exotic fruit. Those flavors come in a push-pull of wanting more and getting more as the wine’s structure yields, untied and unbound as it develops over the course of days, suggesting the course it will take over a decade or more in the cellar. Anthony Filiberti vinified this wine, later blended by Jasmine Hirsch after she took over winemaking at the estate, working with Michael Cruse as consulting winemaker.
The 2018 Chardonnay, reviewed in April 2021:
This is among the best Hirsch chardonnays we’ve tasted, a wine with an ornate, almost baroque complexity woven out of fruit grown on the sandstone ridge along the San Andreas fault. It offers a completely different kind of complexity and depth of flavor than a great Burgundy—California coastal casual, yet precise. If you were to travel to David Hirsch’s remote vineyard and feel the blast of the Pacific winds against the ridge as you stand alongside the vines he planted in 1994 on a steep, rocky slope facing directly toward the sea, you might begin to sense the pure, terroir-driven nature of this wine. Along with fruit from those 2.5 acres, this wine includes Hirsch’s younger block of chardonnay, also west-facing, 1.4 acres planted in 2002 on a nearby sandstone hillside. The cool 2018 season produced a chardonnay that defies oxidation, still beautiful a week after it was first opened, destined to thrive for decades.