Tom Sinton was raised on a ranch in the Paso Robles, California, area, where his family raised cattle, sugar beets and alfalfa, inspiring his lifelong love of plants, per his winery bio.
When he was 15, he spent a life-changing summer with a family in Reims, France, where he was served wine at every meal. In time, he would establish Shell Creek Vineyards in 1972 on the family ranch, farming grapes for the next 13 years.
While he left wine for a decade and a half, its tentacles never fully detached from him.
His son Rob grew up in the Bay Area before attending UC Davis, where he took a wine course that led him to begin making wine at home by fermenting some El Dorado Mourvedre, and to soon change his major to enology and viticulture.
In 2011, Rob and his father began making wine under the Starfield Vineyards brand.
“Starfield was the name we chose early on. We really started thinking we were not going to be more than a just a custom crush and sourcing fruit from vineyards that we liked,” Rob said in an interview done back in June. But sourcing those didn’t last. “I should have known better than like someone who planted 100 acres in Paso in his 20s was going to not be satiated by making wine from other people’s grapes. And he was not. So we planted our own, and that happened pretty quickly.”
Tom then chimed in. “There were there were reasons for it. When you’re buying grapes in Napa and Sonoma, you get pushed around a lot. We were making some really nice Cabernet, and then Paul Hobbs bought the vineyard and kicked everybody out, and you know, you were sitting there saying, ‘Geez, we spent three years, and we just were honing the winemaking technique, and you’re gone. And then you have to start over. It didn’t work at all. We made Cabernet from Stagecoach [Vineyard] in ‘24. I think our last Napa Cab. We started over there, and it just got, frankly, way too expensive. We paid Gallo $14,000 a ton for that. … we don’t know enough billionaires. Frankly, we may not know any billionaires.”
So a year later, Tom and Rob selected a 67-acre property in the Sierra Foothills, east of Placerville and a little less than an hour’s drive from Sacramento, in the El Dorado AVA, to bring Starfield to its current home.
The winery, at 2750 Jacquier Road, is open daily from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., offering several tasting rooms, an amphitheater that’s built into the hillside overlooking Starfield Lake, 3 miles of dog-friendly nature trails that take visitors through the diverse landscape of the mountain property, vineyards and gardens, and a new food program featuring Roman-style Pizza Alla Palla.
Rob began working on the winemaking with his father in 2020, and two years later relocated to Placerville to become the head winemaker while managing other aspects of the operation. So far, so good for the vintage, with a growing year that featured a roller-coaster start and has since stayed close to average.
“I think we get our cooling primarily from elevation, and it may be a little bit more consistent than just regular cooling from a storm. So that part has been relatively consistent,” Tom said, responding to a question about their observations of the effects of climate change there. “But definitely, spring is starting a little earlier. We definitely did this year. You know, being a farmer, you get pretty focused on the year you’re in, and like, what’s this doing? Why is this weird? And it’s always a a little weird. But it was warm in March, and then it got cold in April. And right it looks pretty normal. I can’t give you a great analysis of it, but overall, you’d have to believe it’s generally warming up, and that’s one of the reasons we planted most of the varietals we did up here. We wanted strong aromatics, thinking that you’re planting for a long period of time and you’re facing climate change, more is better. So we do get quite a bit of aromatic intensity, and part of that is just the location of where we are in the mountains, I think, for some reason or other, mountain fruit produces. Maybe it’s the absence of other characters or whatever, but you get a distinct varietal character in a lot of the wines. We sort of leaned into that, and we thought we were going to get it, and we have gotten it.”
That Sierra Spice, as they call the influence of their hillside woodland on the wine, is defined in a page in their marketing materials in addition to one of the three vials they send out in the package, which also include soil samples for their Mourvedre and Viognier vines.
“In general, they’re lighter wines. They’re not the sort of heavily extracted Napa style,” Tom said. “I wouldn’t want to necessarily pin that on Napa. I think, if you want to pin it on anybody, you could probably pin it on Robert Parker, who kind of persuaded everybody that you couldn’t sell it unless you produced something that he liked to drink. So they all started doing it."
They planted their vines on the steep volcanic slopes from 2012 to 2017, Tom said, a majority of those Rhone varietals such as Syrah, Grenache, Roussanne, Mourvedre, Viognier, Cinsault and Counoise, all complemented by other varieties including Aglianco, Vermentino, Fiano, Barbera and Tempranillo. Those are divided into 24 blocks, roughly an acre and a half each at an elevation of around 2,400 feet, all sites selected with slope, orientation, shading and temperature in mind.
Starfield’s wines, a majority of them varietals, range in price from $24 to $48, and include a couple of sparklings and a port. They stopped adding much to the lineup, Rob said, when they realized that producing more varieties wasn’t improving sales.
“We do still experiment. We did a light alcohol wine. We are planning to bottle and release a sparkling non-alcoholic wine,” he said. “We did a vermouth that I still need to remake. Generally I think we’re cutting back, I would say, on traditional red and white blends, red and white varieties, to get everything a little bit more in a unique lane, so that we don’t have so many … Grenache, Cinsaut, Counoise, while they are for the really big winos like me and my dad are, which is, part of the thing you go in with is your own palate. It’s fun to taste them all side by side, but I think for many drinkers, it’s apples and apples.
“I think the things that I look for in other wines and winemakers is true to expression of the variety, clean,” continued Rob, whose role continues to expand beyond the cellar, from often installing Ikebana displays in the tasting room to converting his longstanding passion for astronomy and photography into designing Starfield’s new labels, featuring Solargraphs taken with pinhole cameras he built. “At least I can appreciate microbial terroir with dinner occasionally, [but] that’s not really what excites me about someone else’s wine. I’m usually looking for a really nice, clean expression of what I think the grape is, which is partly born out of how we planted the vineyard, which was kind of going around and trying to find, what do these grapes taste like, because you couldn’t find, gosh, I mean now you can kind of find Cinsult, but when we planted it, it was pretty darn hard to find Cinsult to taste. Aglianico was another one. It was like, pretty much the only ones you could find were out of Taurasi in Italy, and I couldn’t tell if that was the grape or the winery I was tasting. So it stuck with me that I really wanted people to taste what I think the grape tastes like. The winemakers that I think deliver that really stick in my head.”
As has been the case since they settled in Placerville, they make the wine at a nearby winery, and “then we give them all the instructions,” Tom said. “There’s a lot of stuff we’d love to do if we had our own facility. Things we would do differently, probably, to have different equipment and that sort of thing. That sort of constrains you, but this is a pretty nice facility we’re in right now.
“Rob’s a big believer in managing the fermentation, which I think is really good,” he added. “And there’s virtually nobody who you employ in that kind of operation cares as much as you do about it, and it can go wrong pretty quickly. I’m sure, as you well know, that that most people who care about it are tasting it once or twice a day, and just checking the fermentation, making sure that it’s all progressing. So those are the sorts of things that you end up doing a lot of. Right now, we’re pretty happy with the situation. I think in the current market, we’re thinking at some point maybe the wineries will become available at a reasonable price, and we might find one. So we’re not ruling that out. We see over in Napa that there’s a fair amount of stuff that changes hands over there, but I I don’t think we’ve seen anywhere near the level of transfers and all that that I think we’re going to see.”
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