Our Estate

Located in the serene Alexander Valley, in Sonoma County, California, Toby Lane Vineyards makes its home on the beautiful rolling hills of  Chalk Hill Ranch.  A 90 minute trip north east of San Francisco the Martin family have been growing grapes here for the past 30 years.

The early grape years showed great promise of producing a consistent high quality product and were confirmed with consecutive sales of the grapes to high end wineries from both Napa and Sonoma County.

Prior to the grapes the land was home to horses!  Grandma Willi and Grandpa Toby purchased the land to fulfill their love of raising and training horses.  This led to decades of horses grazing the hills and valleys depositing an organic wealth to the land.  We’ve suspected that part of the secret to our above average grapes may well be due to the fertilizer the horses provided!

After the taste of success other wineries experienced with our grapes, we bottled our first barrels in 2004.  Friends that we shared the wine with were enthusiastic in their praise.  Over the subsequent 6 years we have gone from 2 barrels (50 cases) in Uncle Frank’s garage winery to producing 25 cases of Merlot and 125 cases of Cabernet Sauvignon in 2008!  Our first commercial vintage came in 2008.   We were thrilled to be able to produce our wine in a state of the art gravity flow winery, which is where we continue to make our in wine today.  We give great thanks to Uncle Frank for helping us in our humble beginning.

Toby Lane is not only the home to our winery it is also our family ranch and happily remains home to many horses.