Bonny Doon Vineyard and the Vineyards on the Mountain
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, on the mountain, the Beauregard family has spent generations growing wine at sites in the Bonny Doon area.
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.
In an April 2026 essay for Wine-Searcher, Grahm wrote about launching a new project built around what he calls "wines of place," and reflected on his years making Le Cigare Volant in the past tense.
The table compares the two operations:
| 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. His father Jim, the vineyard's current viticulturist, pushed to have this cooler, sandy-loam pocket of the Santa Cruz Mountains recognized as the Ben Lomond Mountain American Viticultural Area, 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 wine history.
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.
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.
Bonny Doon Vineyard's fruit comes from Popelouchum in San Benito County, while the Beauregard family farms on the mountain. The festival supports science programs at Bonny Doon Elementary. These are distinct parts of the area's wine and community story.
Together, these vineyards and community programs help shape Bonny Doon’s local identity.
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.
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