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About Donelan Wines
Donelan Wines at 56 West Spain Street in downtown Sonoma is one of California's most focused and intellectually serious single-vineyard Syrah producers, founded in 2003 by Joe and Kathleen Donelan with a singular obsession: finding and expressing the most compelling cool-climate Syrah vineyard sites available in northern California.
The downtown Sonoma Plaza location makes Donelan one of the most accessible serious small-production labels in wine country, a walk-in tasting room where visitors can taste single-vineyard expressions from Russian River Valley, Sonoma Coast, and other northern California cool-climate sites without the appointment-only barrier that most comparable producers maintain. Syrah is the primary focus, with each vineyard bottling telling a different story about what cool-climate viticulture and site-specific soil profiles contribute to California's most exciting red variety.
Walk-ins are welcome daily from 11am to 5pm with a $30 starting fee. The downtown Sonoma location puts Donelan within easy walking distance of the Sonoma Plaza's restaurants, other tasting rooms, and the historic mission and barracks.
Obsidian, the family's own vineyard on a steep promontory above the Franz Valley floor in Knights Valley, was destroyed by the 2017 Tubbs fire and has now come all the way back. It was replanted at 2,000 vines per acre, denser than before to keep yields per vine low, and laid out as nine separate blocks fermented individually and assembled by sequential blending with no racking until bottling. The 2023 is the first Obsidian Syrah since the fire, and Decanter awarded it 100 points in January 2026, which is remarkable for fruit off five-year-old vines. The site is volcanic: stones keep surfacing through the topsoil, the vines struggle for water even in rainstorms, and afternoon breezes sweep the ridge.
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