Roger Scommegna Fulfills a Dream

The vintner has finally conquered Signal Ridge, his extreme Mendocino Pinot Noir site

- JAMES MOLESWORTH

Roger Scommegna was working a lot and flying often. The Chicago native had founded a website. It was the '90s and the Internet was booming. Business was good.

“I always took a copy of Wine Spectator with me to read on the plane,” says Scommegna. “Whatever city I visited, I would use the magazine to [find] all the wine restaurants highlighted in that town.

“Then I sold my website and suddenly had monopoly money. So I decided to go to Napa and try and live the Wine Spectator dream.”

Scommegna tried to buy a vineyard. And that was the start of a 20-plus-year adventure.

“Even with monopoly money, I couldn’t buy a spot in Napa,” says Scommegna, now 63. “So I headed over to Sonoma. But compared to Napa, Sonoma was too spread out and I couldn’t figure out the right spot. And then I heard someone say ‘Mendocino Ridge.’ I thought that sounded cool. So I called up a realtor and they told me ‘Guess what? We just got a place listed.”

“It was a 120-acre property on a ridge line at 2,700 feet of elevation. And I thought, well, every great vineyard I ever read about in Wine Spectator wasn’t in the flats. It was always in some place extreme, or up on a mountain. I thought this had to be it,” says Scommegna as he looks out over his vineyard with the next ridge line in the distance, just 9 miles from the Pacific Coast.

Signal Ridge Vineyard lies at the end of a slow 30-minute drive up a steep, narrow and winding dirt road that heads west from the town of Boonville in Mendocino County’s Anderson Valley. At the time Scommegna purchased it, the site was forested. Scommegna was told that wouldn’t be a problem.