America’s Smallest Wine Appellation Is For Sale

There are entire vineyards larger than the totality of Cole Ranch AVA in Mendocino, California. It’s the smallest American Viticultural Area (AVA) in the country and the whole appellation is for sale—on the market for $3.3M.

Cole Ranch is located about 20 minutes from Hopland, a couple of hours from San Francisco in what’s known as the North Coast region. It covers 150 acres of land, though less than 60 are planted with Cabernet Sauvignon, Riesling, Pinot Noir and Merlot at an elevation range of 1,400 to 1,600 feet.

Mendocino, where Cole Ranch is situated, is nested between California’s Coastal Mountain Range and the Pacific Ocean in a tremendously bio-diverse environment of northern redwoods and thick coniferous forests. Mountainous and in some places remote, Mendocino sits along the San Andreas Fault.

Wine appellations in the U.S. and around the world are officially delineated due to certain factors that make the growing area unique. Typically they are comprised of multiple vineyards owned and farmed by various parties, but Cole Ranch is unique. Rather than being a shared growing area, it was designed to be farmed by a single owner—originally John Cole—the founder of Cole Ranch.

When John Cole encountered the cool climate, highland location in the early 1970s he felt it was the ideal location to grow grapes, envisioning the setting it would one day become. It’s no easy feat to carve a vineyard out of rough land. It’s also no easy feat to establish an AVA, but John Cole did both.

Sensing that his property’s location and terroir produced unique wines, Cole undertook the petitioning process with The Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau (TTB)—a grueling long game for which the manual describing the necessary steps is 35 pages long. Petitioners enter what the TTB calls a “deliberate process, which frequently takes multiple years to complete.”

John Cole was sucessful—in 1983, Cole Ranch was granted AVA status. This was the same year that other notable California AVAs became official, including Los Carneros, Paso Robles and Russian River Valley.

There isn’t a single winery in the appellation, never has been. Cole primarily produced grapes for local wineries and Cole Ranch fruit has been included in bottles by Hopland neighbor Fetzer as well as V. Sattui, Jordan, Blackstone, Vision Cellars and Tobin James. Cole eventually sold the property to Esterlina Vineyards, a winery that experienced particular success with the aromatic, dry Rieslings cultivated on the property.

So what do you get for $3.3M? The listing includes 55 acres of vineyards and a vineyard manager’s house. The property encompasses natural spring water, a well, septic system and water rights to an adjacent reservoir. The listing for the property indicates that “approximately 130 tons of grapes [were] sold to nearby wineries.”

The Cole Ranch property is offered by California Outdoor Properties listing agent Todd Renfrew. Complete information can be found on the company’s website.

This post first appeared on Forbes.com. To see the original, click here.