History
Balvern planted from 1969, and Dr. Richard Ferrington, a Santa Rosa dermatologist, bought the property in the 1980s and gave it the name it still carries. His son John, who trained at Montpellier and died in 2001, brought Burgundian budwood home in a suitcase and established French clonal material here early; Burt Williams met him in 1992 and made the first Ferrington designate that vintage. Kurt Schoeneman, who came to farming from construction, bought the vineyard in 1996 and remade it, ripping the compacted clay, installing irrigation and drainage, and replanting from 1997 with clones matched to individual parcels. He died in 2025, and Heather Schoeneman and the family farm it now with Paul Ardzrooni managing. Their daughter Sarah Schoeneman and her husband Guy Pacurar founded Fathers + Daughters Cellars in 2012, the year their daughter Ella was born, and take most of their fruit here.
The Site
The vineyard occupies a gentle south-facing slope on the valley floor near Boonville, in the southeastern corner of the appellation, inside a property of about 160 acres. Elevation is usually given as 400 feet, with the planted range running roughly 300 to 500. Three to four feet of sandy loam sit over a ripped clay layer on Franciscan sandstone. The Pacific is some fifteen miles west, near enough to push cool afternoon air up the valley but not to hold fog over the site as it does at the deep end, and growers here report diurnal swings of 50 degrees Fahrenheit and more. That combination of daytime warmth and cold nights is what fills the fruit out without flattening its acidity. Boonville edges into Winkler Region II, where Philo, down-valley, sits in Region I.
Vines and Blocks
Published planted acreage runs from about 70 to 80. The fullest breakdown gives 45 acres of Pinot Noir, 16 of Chardonnay, 12 of Gewürztraminer and roughly an acre of the original 1969 Sauvignon Blanc, the oldest producing vines on the property; other accounts put Pinot Noir nearer 27 acres, and nothing published reconciles the two. The Pinot Noir is unusually broad genetically, taking in Pommard and Wädenswil 2A beside the 1950s UC Davis selections 4, 5 and 6, the French clones 113, 114, 115, 667, 777, 828 and 943, and the suitcase material John Ferrington carried home. Rootstocks are 101-14, SO4 and some 1103P, trained to vertical shoot positioning on bilateral cordon, and the Chardonnay includes old Wente selection. No blocks carry names.
The Wines
Williams Selyem is the longest-standing bottler, with more than thirty years of the designate behind it. Arista, Failla, FEL, Breggo, Davies, Schramsberg, Flowers, Auteur, Saxon Brown, Black Kite, MacPhail, Twomey, Texture, Poe and Brick & Mortar have all made a Ferrington wine, the last of those a Chardonnay drawn entirely from the old Wente material. Fathers + Daughters bottles a Ferrington Pinot Noir and an Ella's Reserve above it, along with The Dance, a white blend led by the old Sauvignon Blanc with Gewürztraminer and Chardonnay behind it. Buyers describe the fruit consistently, in terms of crushed strawberry and raspberry and a lifted, high-toned aromatic, with more flesh than the cold end of the valley gives.