On a coastal ridge shaped by the nearby San Andreas Fault, David Hirsch divided 72 planted acres into 67 farming blocks, following abrupt changes in soil, slope and exposure. Hirsch, the founder of Hirsch Vineyards who helped establish the West Sonoma Coast as a source of acclaimed Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, died on July 28, 2026, at 81.

The San Francisco Chronicle reported his death a day later, with confirmation and reflections from his daughter Jasmine Hirsch, the vineyard's winemaker. His was a life organized around one demanding place: a former sheep ranch near Fort Ross and Cazadero, high above the Pacific, where dirt roads, winter storms and fractured geology resisted easy farming.

Hirsch was born on September 7, 1944, and grew up in the Bronx. A scholarship took him to Columbia University, but he left after a year. He then crossed the country by thumb, worked on an Alaska railway and spent time on boats in Duluth, Minnesota. By the 1960s he had settled in the Santa Cruz Mountains, where wine entered his life. In the following decade, work in the garment trade brought him to Paris, and side trips to Burgundy sharpened his interest in Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and the relationship between farming and taste.

In 1978, he bought a remote coastal ranch with no plan to make wine. Jim Beauregard, a friend and early Santa Cruz Mountains winegrower, saw another possibility in the ridges. Hirsch followed his advice in 1980 by planting three acres: one of Pinot Noir and two of Riesling. The official Hirsch Vineyards history traces the improbable progression from those vines to a property whose grapes, by the 1990s, were bottled under the names of Littorai, Williams Selyem, Kistler and Failla.

The choice was audacious because the coast had not yet acquired its modern wine identity. Pacific fog moved across the lower elevations, the terrain rose and fell sharply, and the fault zone produced rapid changes in the ground. Hirsch responded by treating small sections as distinct farms rather than forcing the ranch into a single formula. Planting expanded through the 1990s and early 2000s, eventually reaching 72 acres of vines across a much larger tract where most of the land remained undeveloped.

That attention to the site shaped more than Hirsch's own vineyard. Kistler, Williams Selyem and Littorai began purchasing his fruit in 1994, and their vineyard-designated wines carried the Hirsch name to collectors far beyond Sonoma County. In its 2021 profile, Decanter placed the estate among California's defining Pinot Noir properties and emphasized how its many parcels demanded exacting, site-by-site farming.

For more than two decades, Hirsch concentrated on growing grapes for other producers. In 2002 he made the first estate Pinot Noir and began creating a winery on the ranch. The purpose was as practical as it was ambitious: wine from individual blocks could reveal what his choices in the vineyard had produced. Winery construction was completed in 2003, and estate Chardonnay followed with the 2006 vintage. The Hirsch label became another way to read the same land, alongside the interpretations made by the producers who continued to buy its fruit.

Hirsch also helped give the wider region an official name. Patrick Shabram, acting for himself and Hirsch, petitioned federal regulators in 2003 to create the Fort Ross-Seaview American Viticultural Area. The record published by the Federal Register identified Hirsch as a co-petitioner and documented his vineyard's role in explaining the area's high elevations, coastal fog patterns and distinctive terrain. Federal recognition arrived in 2012, placing a defined boundary around a winegrowing community that had been far less visible when Hirsch planted his first vines.

His pursuit kept changing as he learned from the property. Hirsch began the transition to biodynamic viticulture in 2011. By 2014, all 72 vineyard acres, along with the ranch's orchards and gardens, were being farmed under those practices. The shift extended his focus beyond grapes to the health of a working landscape whose forests, gardens and vineyard blocks were treated as connected parts of one farm.

Family carried the work into its next chapter. Jasmine Hirsch returned to the business in 2008, became general manager in 2015 and took over winemaking in 2019. Marie Hirsch, David's wife, contributed to the winery's design and marketing. The company remained family owned as responsibility moved toward a second generation, while vineyard manager Everardo Robledo continued work that had begun in the late 1980s.

What persists on that ridge is unusually concrete: Pinot Noir propagated from the original 1980 planting, Chardonnay first established in 1994, dozens of parcels farmed according to their own conditions, and bottles from Hirsch and its longtime clients that carry the vineyard's name. Fort Ross-Seaview now appears on labels and maps. The ranch, the wines and the people who continue to tend them preserve David Hirsch's long experiment in listening closely to one piece of California ground.