The Winery That Named This Mountain Doesn't Grow Here Anymore
If you buy a bottle of Bonny Doon Vineyard's Le Cigare Volant off a shelf in San Francisco or Chicago, you are drinking grapes grown in San Benito County. Not from the mountain the label made famous. From Popelouchum, a 280-acre estate near San Juan Bautista that the winery's founder bought in 2009 and that has supplied its fruit since a 2020 ownership change.
Meanwhile, up on the actual mountain, a family that has never once put "Bonny Doon" in its own name has spent three generations growing the wine that arguably deserves the address more than the famous label does. That is the twist worth understanding if you live here: the neighborhood's most recognized export and the neighborhood's actual vineyard operation are, at this point, two different things.
Randall Grahm founded Bonny Doon Vineyard in 1983 in the Santa Cruz Mountains, originally chasing Pinot Noir before pivoting to Rhone varieties like Grenache and Mourvedre. The gamble worked. In 1986 he released the first vintage of Le Cigare Volant, and by 1989 Wine Spectator put him on its cover as "The Rhone Ranger." The winery grew into a nearly 500,000-case operation before Grahm sold off the higher-volume Big House and Cardinal Zin labels in 2006 to refocus on smaller, terroir-driven wines. For a long stretch, Bonny Doon Vineyard and the mountain of Bonny Doon were the same story.
That story split in 2020, when Grahm sold the Bonny Doon brand to WarRoom Ventures LLC, a company built by industry veteran Andrew Nelson. Grahm stayed on as a partner and head winemaker, and production manager Nicole Walsh remained to run the cellar, but the winery's footprint changed. Production narrowed to four core wines built around Le Cigare Volant, all made from Popelouchum fruit rather than anything grown on the Bonny Doon ridge itself.
The clearest sign of how far Grahm has mentally moved on came this spring. In an April 2026 essay for Wine-Searcher, he wrote about launching a new project built around what he calls "wines of place," reflecting on his years making Le Cigare Volant in the past tense, as something he used to do rather than something he still does. The man who put the mountain's name on wine labels worldwide is now describing that chapter as behind him.
Here is what that leaves on the ground versus what it leaves on paper:
| Bonny Doon Vineyard (the brand) | Beauregard Vineyards (the mountain) | |
|---|---|---|
| Founded | 1983 | 1949 |
| Where the fruit grows now | Popelouchum estate, San Juan Bautista | Beauregard Ranch and three other Bonny Doon area sites |
| Ownership | WarRoom Ventures, since 2020 | Same family, four generations |
| Tasting room | No longer operating in Bonny Doon | 10 Pine Flat Road, Bonny Doon |
Amos Beauregard, a retired sheriff's deputy, bought a 160-acre vineyard and apple orchard on the mountain in 1949. The land, once known as the Quistorf Ranch, had sat abandoned since Prohibition. Amos replanted it with Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Chardonnay and Muller-Thurgau, and the family has farmed it through replantings in 1980 and 2005.
Today Ryan Beauregard, Amos's great-grandson, has been the winemaker since his first vintage in 2000. His wife Rachel runs the business side, and the two live on site with their daughters. His father Jim, the vineyard's current viticulturist, is the reason there is now a Ben Lomond Mountain American Viticultural Area at all: he pushed to have this cooler, sandy-loam pocket of the Santa Cruz Mountains recognized as its own appellation, distinct from the broader mountain range around it.
Wine critics have taken notice. Billy Norris of Vinous has called Beauregard "the leader of the pack in Ben Lomond Mountain," and Matt Kettmann at Wine Enthusiast has written that Ryan Beauregard is making some of the better wines in California right now. The tasting room sits at 10 Pine Flat Road, a short drive up from Highway 1, on land that longtime visitors associate with the mountain's original wine identity, back before that identity moved south to San Benito County.
The Beauregard Ranch block itself climbs from 700 to 1,850 feet on a southwest-facing slope, catching Monterey Bay's marine influence at the lower elevations while sitting above the fog line higher up. Combined with sandy loam soil, that combination produces the mineral edge and acidity Jim Beauregard argued was distinct enough to warrant its own AVA rather than getting lumped into the much larger Santa Cruz Mountains designation. The family now farms four sites across the mountain, including Ben Lomond Mountain, Coast Grade, Bald Mountain, and the home ranch, all within a few miles of each other but each showing slightly different character in the glass.
Wine here doubles as school funding. The Bonny Doon Art, Wine & Brew Festival is a benefit run by the Bonny Doon Community School Foundation, a 501(c)(3) that uses the proceeds to fund science and arts programs at Bonny Doon Elementary, the small K-8 school that anchors the community. A recent edition raised more than $50,000 for those programs alone.
The festival has grown into a genuine autumn tradition, with a listing this year describing it as the 23rd annual event, consistent with a festival that got its start in the early 2000s. Exact dates for 2026 were not yet locked as of this writing, but vendor and performer applications are already open, and recent years have leaned toward early September. Past lineups have included:
It is a small, self-funded, community-run event, and that is the point. Nobody from WarRoom Ventures is pouring at this festival. The wineries who show up are the ones still farming the mountain.
If you want to close out a wine afternoon on foot, Bonny Doon Beach sits at the intersection of Highway 1 and Bonny Doon Road, part of the Coast Dairies State Park land. The Bonny Doon Beach Loop is an easy nine-tenths of a mile, and the bluff trails north and south of the beach connect toward Shark Fin Cove and views of Panther Beach, giving you a short, low-effort way to trade redwood shade for open coastline in the same afternoon.
None of this means Bonny Doon Vineyard's wines are worse now, or that Grahm did anything wrong by selling a business he built. It means the label on the bottle and the place on the map have quietly gone their separate ways, and most people outside the mountain have no reason to know that. If you live here, though, it is worth knowing which of your neighbors is still farming the ridge, which nonprofit keeps your elementary school's science programs funded, and which family has been doing both since before the winery that made the mountain famous even existed.
That is usually how it goes in a place like this. The name that travels is rarely the one still doing the work.
If you ever find yourself curious about what a home near this stretch of mountain is actually worth, or just want someone who already knows which vineyard is which, the team at Room Real Estate has been paying attention to Santa Cruz County's back roads for a long time. Reach out whenever you're ready to talk.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
You've got questions and we can't wait to answer them.