Starry Night
Sonoma County region
Chairman’s Award and multiple Gold Medal Winner
Although Starry Night Winery became a bonded winery in 1999, the story of how the winery came into existence starts many years earlier when four friends started making wine at an amateur level.
Wayne Hansen, Bruce Walker, Mike Miller and Skip Granger shared a lifelong passion for wine as well as an increasing disdain for the over priced and often mass-produced wines found in the market and decided to try their hand in the winery business.
They began purchasing grapes to produce small lots of Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon and Chardonnay in Wayne’s basement and spent time researching wine making methods, taking classes at UC Davis, and receiving helpful advice from a number of commercial winemakers in the Sonoma County area.
By November of 2000, the friends released their first commercially available wines, which were extremely well received and even better than expected.
Starry Night Winery has since expanded their wine portfolio to showcase the range of regions within Sonoma County and continues to earn prestigious honors at top competitions throughout California.
