SILVERSHOT VINEYARDS

This is our home site, our “estate,” and our namesake.

In the winter of 1999, Jim Fischer Sr. and his brother Bill collected pruning wood from neighboring vineyards and started their own nursery from the cuttings. The first vines were put in the ground the following year on a five-acre field with a gentle south-facing slope and the shallow, rockiest soils on the property, eventually growing to fifteen acres under vine. Jim and Bill originally named the site Crowley Station Vineyards to honor the historic railroad station located at the foot of Holmes Hill, itself a reference to Solomon Kimsey Crowley, a white settler who came to the area in 1855. In 2016, we renamed the site to Silvershot Vineyards, for the family horse of the same name that once roamed the land that would become the first vineyard block.

We help Jim Sr. farm about seven acres of the site, six of which are Pinot noir (114, 115, 777, Pommard, and a few "suitcase" clones of unknown provenance), with an acre of Pinot gris (Colmar clone). Since day one, the vines are dry-farmed (no irrigation) and own-rooted (ungrafted), pushing through thin sedimentary soils and fractured sandstone that was once the seafloor during the Oligocene epoch. We’ve been running an organic management program since 2019. The site is south/southwest-facing on the lower portion of Holmes Hill at the exit of Holmes Gap (better known as the end of the Van Duzer Corridor) and bears the brunt of strong, cooling winds drawn through the gap from the coast. The combination of virtually no water-retaining topsoil and the sharp diurnal temperature shifts from the marine breezes make the grapes from Silvershot like no others: tiny clusters with thick skins and little juice make for intense concentration and color density (particularly noticeable in the very noir-like Pinot gris!). The resulting wines are equally distinctive: deeply pigmented, favoring more savory earthy flavor characteristics, tannic without being thick or dense, and with a signature saline minerality.