Grapes ripening before harvest in Oak Knoll
SUSTAINABILITY
Farmed with Intention, from the Start
The vineyard at Rancho El Stresso is farmed organically: no synthetic herbicides, no pesticides, no shortcuts. This was never an afterthought. When Leslie and Jay Ryder set out to build their vineyard estate, sustainable farming and genuine attention to detail were the starting point, not a selling point. Finding the right people to lead that vision was the first order of business. They found them in Faith Armstrong and Mike Nuñez. Faith, winemaker and founder of Forward Wine & Vine Management, has spent her career working with small family growers across Napa and Sonoma Valley on exactly this approach, and she’s direct about why: the most interesting, site-expressive wines she’s made have consistently come from vineyards farmed this way. It’s not a philosophical position so much as a conclusion she keeps arriving at after twenty plus years of experience. At Rancho El Stresso, Faith works alongside Mike Nuñez of Nuñez Vineyard Management, a third-generation family operation with over 25 years farming premium estate vineyards across Napa and Sonoma. Mike’s team brings deep expertise in organic farming practices, dry farming techniques, and the kind of hands-on vine attention that simply isn’t possible at corporate scale. Together, Faith and Mike share a conviction that the details matter at every step: canopy management, soil health, timing, and they firmly believe that cutting corners in the vineyard will always show up in the glass eventually.
“Organic practices build healthier soils, and healthier soils make better wine.”
THE OWL BOXES: NATURAL PEST CONTROL AT WORK
This vineyard is an ecosystem, not just a crop. The goal isn’t to control nature, it’s to work with it.
One of the things we’re proudest of at Rancho El Stresso is something you might walk right past on a vineyard tour: the owl boxes. Barn owls are one of the most effective natural pest control tools in wine country. A single nesting pair, plus their offspring, can hunt more than a thousand rodents over the course of a season, gophers, voles, mice, the same animals that damage vine roots and drive conventional growers toward rodenticides. We don’t use those. Instead, we’ve created habitat for the owls to do what they do naturally, and they’ve rewarded us by showing up and staying.
WHY SMALL-SCALE PRODUCTION MATTERS
There’s a version of the wine business that is very good at scale. It optimizes for volume, consistency, and margin. It produces a lot of wine and moves it efficiently through a lot of channels. It is not this. Rancho El Stresso produces a small amount of wine from a small vineyard, made by a winemaker who knows this vineyard intimately and makes every decision accordingly. There is no formula, no brand standard applied across 40 different SKUs, no winemaking by committee. What there is: a single place, a specific vintage, and a lot of genuine attention paid to both. This is what micro-winery production actually means in practice. The footprint is smaller, less water, less energy, and less waste per bottle. The relationship between vineyard and glass is shorter and more direct. And the people responsible for what’s in the bottle are the same people you can reach if you want to ask a question about it.