About

The Tale of a Great Wine.

Mark Chesebro’s winemaking career took a long and somewhat circuitous path. He began making beer at home with the help of his oldest brother and father at the age of twelve, and it became a hobby ever since. His mother was half Belgian, so the family always had beer or wine on the table. This early affinity for the companionship of food and wine has significantly impacted his winemaking philosophy.

After studying chemistry and biology at UC Riverside and UC Santa Cruz, Mark took some time out from his academic studies to work in construction. At the age of 25, he went back to school at UC Davis to study enology and viticulture, working seasonally during harvest for a number of years thereafter. In 1990, inspired by the “live off the land” suggestion of some Europeans he met while at Davis, Mark and his family moved to a ranch in Carmel Valley (this ranch would later become the Chesebro estate vineyard and winery we know today) to start an artisan goat and sheep cheese dairy. After five years of running the dairy and cheesemaking operation, he decided to return to winemaking.

Mark took a crush job at nearby Bernardus Winery under winemaker Don Blackburn in the fall of 1994, He ended up staying until the spring of 2005. First working in the cellar, then as Enologist, he eventually became the Winemaker in January of 1999. He basically held every production job available at this venerable 50,000 case winery. Mark notes that this was truly his real winemaking education. It taught him not only about winemaking, but also about the extreme importance and impact of farming. He candidly observes that wine is very easy to botch up in the winery, but it can never be better than the raw materials. Respect for this concept became the guiding force in his approach to the production of fine wine.

Since Spring of 2021 Mark has had the pleasure of working with his son Will Chesebro as co-winemaker. Will grew up with winemaking, both at Bernardus and at Chesebro Wines. He has worked harvest internships at Hobo Wines and Thomas Fogarty, in addition to running the laboratory at J Lohr Winery's white wine facility in Greenfield.

Together Mark and Will are currently launching their Cedar Lane Vineyard label featuring wines from the eponymously named estate vineyard in the Arroyo Seco AVA. These wines were previously bottled under the Chesebro label, but the idea now is to highlight this source vineyard itself and allow the Chesebro label to focus on wines from the Carmel Valley AVA.