Red Wine in the Red Triangle: The Soul of Seawolf Wines

The fog is thick over the Sonoma Coast as Jesse Hall pulls off Highway One. Slipping into one of two 5-mils—the other still wet from yesterday—he weaves his fish through the rocks at Omar's.

Chipping into ping-pong refractions, Hall may be the only one out, but is far from alone. Rock cod, Dungeness crabs, sea anemones, urchins, kelp, sea lions and sharks keep him company along California’s wild edge.

By 9 am the northwest wind is getting up and Hall is driving back to his mountaintop vineyard. Such is a morning in the life—surfing the nooks and crannies of the Red Triangle between deliveries across the Bay Area, timing sessions around tides and vineyard work at Seawolf Wines, the small, organic winery Hall founded with his wife Emma in 2014 in Mendocino County's Yorkville Highlands.

Surfing, like wine, has a way of getting under one's skin and not letting go. For Hall, the twin passions are expressions of the same impulse—a desire to live in harmony with nature's rhythms, cultivating flow rather than force.

His first memory of wine is helping his father and grandfather craft their maiden vintage of Zinfandel in a barn along the Russian River. During that same period, he was racing sailboats on San Francisco Bay and surfing the Marin coast—taking the bus with a lone surf buddy to Stinson and Bolinas.

The pull of the ocean drew Hall south to San Diego, where he spent several years shaping boards in Mission Beach. Coming of age in the 80s and 90s, he admits he was rather closed-minded about surfboards, sticking doggedly to the paper-thin thrusters of the era.

Yet over time Hall incorporated all manner of designs into his repertoire. The evolution in his approach to surfboards mirrors his winemaking philosophy. Much like different boards perform better in different conditions, he came to understand that different grapes and winemaking approaches suit different sites and vintages.

Eventually, he returned to Northern California, to the vineyards on his family's 164-acre farm in the Yorkville Highlands, complemented by formal studies in viticulture at Santa Rosa Junior College and enology at Fresno State.

The decision to return home was made during a weekend surf trip when everything clicked. A friend opened a bottle of Marietta Cellars Angeli Cuvée in the parking lot after a session at a mysterious reef that only breaks on south swells. "I was still a young wine drinker and discovered that I love Zinfandel on that day on the Sonoma Coast," Hall recalls. The California heritage grape would become one of Seawolf's specialties.

Working at several Sonoma and Napa estates, he developed an appreciation for natural, low-intervention winemaking—especially native fermentations, which rely on wild yeasts from the grapes and winery rather than commercial strains. It's a risky but rewarding approach that demands constant attention, ultimately making more complex wines if guided correctly. For Hall, this is where the connection between surfing and winemaking becomes most apparent.

"With natural fermentations, using the yeast and bacteria on the grapes for fermentation, you become one with the living wine similar to surfing a wave," Hall explains. "Natural fermentations are changing by the minute similar to the surf up here—the wind, tides, swells, sandbars. Winemaking is similar to surfing in that you're living moment by moment. The wine is alive—just like the waves—and they both change every day."

South African winemaker Eben Sadie, another surfer-winemaker, makes a similar analogy: "Wine needs to transport the soil to the bottle just as the rail of the surfboard needs to transport the surfer through the line in the waves. When you surf an old-school, single-fin," Sadie explains, "you learn that there's only one line in the wave where the board sits effortlessly. With thrusters, you can surf where you want regardless of the wave's shape—just as with modern, globalized winemaking, you can make wine with little regard for soil or climate."

What terroir is to winegrowers is similar to what particular coastlines are to surfers. As the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and lifelong surfer William Finnegan observes in his memoir, Barbarian Days: ‘The close, painstaking study of a tiny patch of coast, every eddy and angle, even down to individual rocks, and in every combination of tide and wind and swell – a longitudinal study, through season after season – is the basic occupation of surfers at their local break.’

Hall practices this same attunement at 2,000 feet in the Seawolf vineyard, above the fog line in the Yorkville Highlands, where northwest breezes funnel up the redwood-lined Navarro River valley each morning.

Hall named the winery after Jack London's 1904 novel The Sea-Wolf—a fitting tribute for a venture born of both land and ocean. From the elevated vineyard, when you look out at the marine layer below, it resembles the sea itself—redwood tops poking through like kelp.

"Kelp forests, especially bull kelp on the North Coast, are very important to hundreds of species of marine life including surfers, salmon, and rockfish," Hall says. "For surfers, it keeps the waves smooth and glassy even on windy North Coast days."

The Navarro Rivermouth is the closest break to the vineyard, but Hall stalks the entire North Coast—Marin, Sonoma, and Mendocino. When we met for lunch in Healdsburg, he'd just returned from Panama, where he'd enjoyed shedding his 5-mil rubber for 83-degree sand point waves.

A Seawolf himself, Hall lives by his favorite London quote:

I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dry-rot. The function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days trying to prolong them. I shall use my time.