History
Savoy opened Green Apple in 1967 and later sold it to three longtime employees through a buyout that ran for about a decade. A Burgundy drinker, he planted here from 1991 and added blocks through the mid-1990s, with sources giving 1992, 1993, 1994 and 1996 for the later rounds. He held a second Anderson Valley property, Deer Meadows, which supplied the contracted acre behind Littorai's One Acre and which Ted Lemon bought outright in 2017. Littorai has taken Savoy fruit since 1995, its longest continuous vineyard relationship. Cliff Lede bought the vineyard in 2011, two years after his family acquired Breggo Cellars, and renamed that winery FEL for his mother Florence Elsie Lede; 2012 was FEL's first vintage and 2022 its last from Savoy. The Donum Estate bought the property in June 2023, its first purchase of an established vineyard and its first outside Sonoma County, taking FEL's Ryan Hodgins and Sarah Green with it.
The Site
The parcel runs to 52 acres west of Philo, near where Gowan Creek meets the Navarro River, at the valley's narrowest point beside Hendy Woods, and accounts of the planted area range from 42 to 44 acres lying between about 200 and 320 feet. The ground slopes gently southwest across terraces at the foot of the hills, rising into low knolls. This is the cool half of the valley, and yet hills close in on two sides and hold more warmth than the position predicts, which is the paradox behind the wines. Donum names four soils on the property, Bearwallow, Perrygulch, Pinole and Boontling loams; Littorai gives Pinole and Boont over Franciscan shale; Radio-Coteau describes terrace deposits carrying river gravel. Those are different blocks rather than conflicting accounts, and the loams retain enough water for several of them to be dry-farmed. Farming was certified organic under Lede, and Donum had the site Regenerative Organic Certified by December 2024, dropping sulfur dust, sowing cover crops matched to each soil and grazing sheep here for the first time.
Vines and Blocks
Pinot Noir takes most of the 34 sub-blocks, alongside a small Chardonnay planting dating to the mid-1990s and a little Gewurztraminer. Donum counts twelve selections in all: Dijon 114, 115, 667 and 777, Pommard, Calera, Swan, Mount Eden, Martini and Wadenswil 2A in the Pinot Noir, with Wente and Prosser in the Chardonnay. The fragmentation is the point, because a dozen wineries take genuinely different fruit off one property, and a few of them name the parcel they buy from. Donum's Perrygulch bottling, for one, comes off the lower slopes where the loam carries more clay.
The Wines
Littorai, Radio-Coteau, Peay, Failla, Auteur and Williams Selyem all bottle Savoy; Copain and Phillips Hill have done so; FEL did through 2022; and Donum's first Savoy Pinot Noir and Chardonnay came from the 2023 vintage. Radio-Coteau labels its wine simply Savoy, without the word Vineyard, and had it in the winery's first release in 2002. The house character is dark-fruited and firmly structured, with more flesh than the deep end of the valley usually gives.