During his years as one of America’s top tech lawyers, David Drummond never thought about making wine.
Then, in 2018, he bought a 500-acre, high-elevation ranch in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley that came with a 70-acre vineyard. “My idea was to grow some grapes and kind of live that lifestyle in retirement once I got there,” he says.
“I didn’t set out to go this far,” adds Drummond, 61, who retired in 2020 from his long-held post as senior vice president and chief legal officer for Google and then its parent company, Alphabet.
In retirement, his wine ambitions expanded in a way that’s not typical of wealthy investors. A fan of off-the-beaten-path northern Italian wines, he met and soon teamed up with Sam Bilbro of Idlewild Wines, Sonoma’s leading proponent of growing quirky Italian varieties in local soils.
The result is a bold experiment: Drummond’s Las Cimas Vineyard has Northern California’s largest plantings of Italian and subalpine French varieties in one place.
“We’d get a glass of wine and dinner and talk and sort of dreamed it all up together,” says Bilbro, who focuses on Piedmont varieties at Idlewild Wines.
Beginning in 2020, the pair regrafted 50 acres of the site’s Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon and Zinfandel vines to more than 40 varieties—from Friuli’s white Ribolla Gialla and Tocai Friulano to Piedmont reds Nebbiolo and Grignolino.
Other Piedmont grapes, planted in one-acre plots, include red Dolcetto, Ruché and Freisa, and white Erbaluce, Nascetta and California’s first known Timorasso.
The Alto Adige native red grape Lagrein was grafted onto vines on a particularly windy slope. Friulian reds Schioppettino and Refosco took some of the highest-elevation plots. A section is devoted to cool-climate French Savoie and Jura reds, including Trousseau, Poulsard and Mondeuse.
Farmed using organic and regenerative practices, the crops have gone to adventurous boutique Sonoma wineries. But this month, Drummond and Bilbro will release a new label called Comunità, with five wines, 100 cases of each.
This tale of wine passion, business sense and serendipity began long before Drummond happened to stroll into Idlewild’s Healdsburg tasting room and met Bilbro.
Drummond—son of an Army Lieutenant Colonel who flew in the African-American Tuskegee Airmen pilot corps during World War II—grew up in a largely Sicilian-American neighborhood in Monterey, Calif., where he developed a penchant for Italian home cooking.
But it wasn’t until he started his professional career after Stanford Law School that Drummond discovered fine wine. “As a young lawyer I started seeking wine out, reading about it and thinking about it,” he says. “And the love for wine just kind of grew very quickly.”
From California Cabs and Bordeaux wines, Drummond moved on to exploring powerful Super Tuscans and Umbria’s Sagrantino, and later the elegance of Burgundy and Piedmont’s Nebbiolos. While working at Google in the 2000s, he traveled and tasted his way across Italy, becoming enamored of the Friulian skin-contact wines of Gravner and Radikon.
He first got to know Sonoma through the Healdsburg Jazz Festival, invited there for concerts by his older brother, acclaimed bassist Ray Drummond.
“Sonoma County has just a laid-back feel that I really liked,” Drummond says. “And, driving down Westside Road, I had some thoughts about, ‘Hey, this could be an interesting place to wind up someday.’”
That someday came after he toured a hilly, former grazing ranch several miles above Westside Road; the site had been partially planted to vines in the 1990s. Drummond was struck by the place’s wild nature and its immense panorama, stretching from Geyser Peak to the north to Marin County’s Mount Tamalpais to the south.
Drummond believed the property’s vineyards were “underutilized” by a succession of previous owners who had sold fruit to large brands on the spot market. His curiosity led him to want to experiment and improve quality in the hopes of selling to smaller Sonoma producers whose wines he enjoyed.
Taking the Road Less Traveled By
Shortly after meeting Bilbro, Drummond brought him out to the land. Bilbro says he was floored by its beauty and potential. “I went nuts when I saw the place,” says the fourth-generation grower and producer, who planted his Piedmont native varieties in Mendocino County.
Bilbro—who for years also managed Mendocino’s Fox Hill vineyard, a specialist in organically farmed Italian varieties—talked to Drummond about the possibility of experimenting with other lesser-known varieties. “He kind of put a bug in my ear that you could experiment with some new stuff,” Drummond recalls. “That maybe it would be fun to graft a few acres over to something different.”
Drummond’s first harvest, 2019, was marked by a grape glut that taught him a quick lesson in grower economics. “I have no long-term contracts with anyone. So, when producers cut back, I was one of the folks who pretty much left everything hanging on the vine,” says Drummond. “It was pretty rough.”
So Bilbro and Drummond began talking with urgency about regrafting before the next harvest. Bilbro dove into studying soil and weather maps, consulting his network of small producers who work in the niches of rare-to-California Old World varieties.
He drew a band on a map from Northern France across the Alps to Northern Italy, representing where summer heat and cold collide. He showed it to Drummond. Almost any grapes from that zone, he said, could thrive at Las Cimas.
Drummond rose to the investment, figuring he had little to lose: If he did nothing, his fruit would continue to go unsold.
“We went much, much bigger,” Drummond says. “Because first of all, I thought it would be fun.”
The results have paid off: Las Cimas’ fruit has quickly sold out in the last two vintages.
“Selling an acre of Schioppettino or Falanghina is easier because you’re going to find somebody who really wants that,” Drummond explains.
Comunità’s debut is topped by a pair of white blends. The 2022 Monte Regio (an Italian take on “Monterey”) is a Friuli-style mix of Ribolla Gialla, Riesling, Friulano and Malvasia. The 2023 Via Paraíso (named for a childhood park) is a blend of Kerner, Riesling, Sauvignon Blanc and Malvasia. The lineup also includes a pink 2023 Pinot Grigio Ramato as well as Friuli varietal reds Refosco and Schioppettino.
The wines, which will retail for about $35 to $65, feature labels that resemble funk/soul music album covers from the 1970s.
“I wanted to have a little throwback feeling because the kind of wines we’re trying to make are a reference to the fact that [in Northern California’s history] there used to be a lot more different varieties here.”
