Wentworth Vineyard & Ranch

The good kind of bear poop is loaded with apples. But as veraison progresses, grape matter inevitably creeps in. In the early days Mark’s mutt Jackson made heroic efforts to limit the buffet, charging into the woods for hours or even days at a time, howling his heart out. More recently Mark has turned to strategic dog-sitting, trotting his neighbor’s well-hydrated hound along the vineyard’s edge to anoint the boundary. Nevertheless, as harvest draws near at Wentworth Vineyard, fence repairs become part of his daily routine. Like the mountain lions and wild turkeys, ursine visitors simply come with this territory. 

“You just have to accept that a portion will be lost,” he says. “It’s a compliment that they like the grapes as much as they do.”

It’s a long way from his native New Jersey, and Mark reached it via a winding path. After a long “exploratory phase” that featured hard but satisfying farm work in Vermont and stints at a couple New England craft breweries, he pivoted back toward an interest first kindled by his grandmother, who hailed from Languedoc wine country. “I felt like if I could clean kegs and fill bottles and work on the brew team at small breweries,” Mark recalls, “then I could get a handle on wine production.”

He poked around Sonoma but was drawn to the towering redwoods of Mendocino Ridge, where he sniffed out a parcel between the Anderson Valley and the tiny town of Elk (pop. 208). If you climbed a tree you could see the Pacific, and if the wind was blowing just right, you could hear sea lions barking in the surf. A thin layer of topsoil lay over a slightly acidic clay-loam strata banded with layers of crushed sandstone and shale. When fog rolled up the Greenwood Canyon to the south and the Navarro River to the north, the ridge took on a mystical aspect. 

But once Mark signed the papers it was dirt-under-the-fingernails time, and he wasted no time approaching his fortuitous new neighbor: Jason Drew, a standard-bearer for pinot noir in the Mendocino Ridge appellation. Offering himself as “unpaid help,” Mark was soon cleaning barrels and bins, picking and hauling grapes, sorting berries, doing punchdowns and pumpovers, measuring pH and Brix, hauling hoses, racking, tasting, and blending. 

“I said yes to whatever needed doing at his winery, soaking up as much information as possible while I was beginning to farm my site,” says Mark, who credits Drew’s mentorship along with the guidance of the late Milla Handley, who became the first organically certified wine grower in the Anderson Valley in 2005. “I’m a voracious reader and have read a lot of books on wine, winemaking, vineyards, etcetera,” he adds, “but for me, learning on the job was the best path. Building my business from the roots up—starting with raw land, and farming, planting, doing shovel work, tractor work and nurturing animals and vines for several years prior to making wine to sell—was the absolute best crash course that I could have had.”

It was grueling work. Suffice it to say that by the time he finished planting his own parcel in 2015, Mark had learned the hard way how to spot Mendocino’s notorious poison oak in its dormant phase, and never to touch his shovel blade with bare hands. And his reward, the inaugural harvest of 2019, amounted to … wait for it … all of two barrels.   

It’s a good thing he met Katie in the meantime—and a better thing that they married, because such effort requires a soulmate. Her counsel and spiritual support also propelled their 2017 purchase of a sister site in the “Deep End” of the Anderson Valley: the Nash Mill vineyard, which had been planted in 2003 on a redwood-lined clearing to which local pioneer Jim Barr originally added 150 tons of crushed limestone. 

Nash Mill’s mature vines jump-started the Wentworth label as a going concern. It also gave Mark the opportunity to harness two quite distinct expressions of northern California coastal pinot noir. Lying between 400 and 500 feet of elevation within a cold-air drainage above a creek where steelhead and Coho salmon spawn, Nash Mill’s south-facing slope yields supple, feminine wines that gain complexity from substantial whole-cluster inclusion. 

On the ridgetop Wentworth Vineyard, meanwhile, the extra altitude and maritime influence bless that cuvée with a certain sinewy power. “The skins on the grapes tend to get a little thicker up there. You get more natural tannin, depth of flavor,” Mark observes. “The grapes hang up there for a long time: from bud break to harvest can be upwards of 200 days—last year it was 215. It’s a long and distinct process to ripening. So with the purity of the fruit and the structure that’s naturally there, I feel like we don’t necessarily need to include as much whole-cluster. But I’ve been experimenting with different levels over the past few years.” His intimate sensitivity to each site shows in the stylistic consistency between bottlings, whose fruit-forward profiles channel the same juicy energy from depths that range from Nash Mill’s spicebox elegance to the cedar-and-fir-tree backdrop of Wentworth Vineyard.

And his experimentation will soon have a broader scope, because in 2023 Mark and Katie added the venerable Abel Vineyard to their portfolio. That parcel, which began with suitcase selections from the Côte de Nuits in 1997, has been a valued source for Lioco, Copain, and Dupuis, to name a few. The Wentworths will continue to sell some of the fruit, but are excited about sinking their own roots further into Deep End Anderson Valley and Mendocino Ridge. They plan to add three acres of Chardonnay there, along with an acre of Aligote, while broadening their palette of pinot noir expressions—and renovating a historic barn into a full-fledged production cellar.  

“Each site has a unique character,” Mark says—noting that roughly 55 of their 80 acres remain forested, while the vineyards are farmed organically with minimal or no tillage. “But the broader story and commonality between those two sites, and our new site Abel, is the coastal influence—trees bringing moisture in, the influence of the fog, and the winds off the ocean that help bring clean, cool air into the area during the hot California summer. This is the sweet spot for redwood terroir.