Hirsch Vineyards & Winery

Online identity
Website development and design 2007 & 2011
E-Commerce
2007 to present

The Vineyard & Winery

Cazadero, California

“Real wine from a real site grown by real folks.”

“Perched on a ridge overlooking the Pacific Ocean at Fort Ross, Hirsch Vineyards is the birth ground of great pinot noir on the extreme Sonoma Coast.” (Northern California)

The remote vineyard was founded by David Hirsch in 1980 on this piece of land sitting on the Pacific plates along the San Andreas Fault. The original plan to grow grapes and eventually, he was also destined to make site-specific wine and the Hirsch Vineyard became the Vineyard & Winery. Their passion is to grow fruit that makes wine “profoundly” characteristic of the physical site and due to that, they produce fruit and wine with a vintage specific concentration of pinot noir or chardonnay fruit.

Their goal is “always to focus on the site; that important developments are fruits of mistakes made with a serious attitude; and to never forget that we don’t know what we don’t know.”

The first time we visited the vineyard we spent a lot of time meandering, touching dirt, talking, drinking wine till late at night and tasting multiple agings of a few batches. It was educational and deeply inspiring- all those years ago and we still refer to the experience both in our imaginations and in practical terms often. We loved David Hirsch and his artist, yogini, designer wife, Marie, before we’d ever met. It was one of those golden moments for any business- a phone call out of the blue and the man on the other end saying, “I want to hire you”. The rest fell into place with an almost magical feel.

What We Did & Why

We were delighted with the common ground we all shared in philosophy of design and communication and this made both the website projects dear to our hearts. We were after the vineyard’s timeless, larger-than-life qualities, its complexity. The original site’s goal was to increase visibility, to serve as a sales and online information venue, to inform visitors about the site, your wines, winemaking, and philosophy. It also served to build their mailing list and to reach more individual consumers than they were. The transition from grape-grower to wine producer was fairly recent at the time of the fist site we created, so that was a message needing to get out.

The creation of both iterations of the website revolved around the concept of serving the future by building an information system and sharing the data. “The data is the reality” as David liked to say about his land, his fruit and the wine.

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