History
The ranch stands at 6101 Signal Ridge Road in Philo, a property of roughly thirty-seven acres of which the Mendocino Winegrowers directory lists five as vineyard. No source publishes a planting year. Anthill has described the vines as about twenty years old in material circulated in the early 2020s, and both Anthill and Copain bottled a Baker Ranch designate from the 2007 vintage, so the vines were cropping by then and the planting belongs to the early 2000s rather than to any earlier decade. The Baker family farms the site themselves, and it has stayed a grower's property throughout, with no estate label and no route for the name to reach drinkers except on other people's bottles.
The Site
Signal Ridge Road climbs out of the valley toward ground high enough to carry the Mendocino Ridge appellation, which admits only land at or above 1,200 feet, and Signal Ridge Vineyard, on Cold Spring Mountain further up the same road, sits at 2,742 feet. Baker Ranch is carried in Mendocino Ridge, on mid-slope ground on the south side of Anderson Valley, and the producers who bottle it label the wine Anderson Valley. The aspect is east, which gives the rows the morning sun and spares them the late afternoon, and redwood and Douglas fir stand around the parcel. The soils are the Casabonne-Wohly complex, very shallow and slate-based, high in mineral content and unusually high in pH for California, where vineyard ground almost always runs acid. Trade descriptions attribute the alkalinity to lime in the soil, while one retailer describes the ground more plainly as light sandstone, and that chemistry is what the buyers point to when they explain the wines. The vineyard is farmed to organic practice and without irrigation.
Vines and Blocks
The plantings are Pinot Noir and Syrah, on a scale small enough that no blocks are named and no clone list is published beyond the one selection everybody cites: the Pinot Noir is largely Swan, the heritage material reputed to have come out of Burgundy by way of Joseph Swan. Volumes follow the acreage, so Anthill's Baker Ranch Pinot Noir has been made at around two hundred cases and Copain's 2017 Syrah at 338.
The Wines
Anthill Farms has bottled the Pinot Noir since at least 2007, and it remains the vineyard's calling card: native yeast, forty to fifty percent whole cluster depending on which technical notes are read, about thirty percent new French oak, eleven to twelve months in barrel and alcohols in the low thirteens. The Syrah has followed one winemaker across two labels. Guthrie made it at Copain through at least 2017, that vintage fermented at twenty-five percent whole cluster and raised fourteen months in neutral French oak at 12.7 percent alcohol, and he has bottled it at DuPuis from 2018, now fermented entirely whole cluster on native yeast under a submerged cap in the Northern Rhone manner. Both wines are built low in alcohol and high in acid, with the chalky tannin that notes on the vineyard keep returning to.