Trojak~Knier Winery was started by two long time friends, Jim Knier and Eric Trojak, in 1993 as a home wine making project in Jim's garage in Montara California. With borrowed equipment we made a thirty gallon barrel of Zinfandel from a vineyard in Gilroy and a thirty gallon barrel of Cabernet Sauvignon from the Antinori Estate in the Eastern mountains above the Napa Valley. In 1995 we started sourcing our Zinfandel grapes from the Teldeschi Ranch in Dry Creek west of Healdsburg. We continued making Zinfandel and Cabernet for several years and then branched out to include Sangiovese, Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
In 2003 we moved the operation to a warehouse in Princeton Harbor where we continued to expand the amount of wine we were making. In 2009 we decided it was time to go commercial and received our full licensing in September of that year. The total case production for 2009 was about 350 cases and we will keep production at about that level.
Our wine making philosophy can best be described as truly hand crafted and non-interventionist. We consider ourselves to be caretakers of the fruit and seek to let the flavors of the vineyard express themselves in the wine. In order to make great wines you must start with great grapes. We do all winery operations by hand from loading the crusher/stemmer to bottling, corking and labeling the wine. We do not filter or use any fining agents and all wines are transferred by gravity siphon, whether from barrel-to-barrel or in the bottling process. As a result, our wines may throw a little sediment after some time in the bottle but this is not a flaw - it is an indication of the truly handcrafted nature of our wines.