Sonoma Brothers Distilling

Sonoma Brothers Distilling is the Windsor, California craft spirits operation founded in 2012 by twin brothers Brandon and Christopher Matthies — and one of the most genuinely family-run craft distilleries in the broader Sonoma County wine country. Located at 7759 Bell Road in Windsor (the small Sonoma County town immediately north of Santa Rosa, in the heart of the broader Russian River Valley wine-tourism corridor), Sonoma Brothers occupies a working distillery and tasting room facility in the heart of one of California's most active year-round craft-beverage tourism economies.

The Matthies brothers' commitment to small-batch production is operationally serious in a way most craft distillery marketing language only gestures toward. Both brothers handle essentially every step of the production pipeline themselves — mashing, fermenting, distilling, aging, bottling — and the visitor experience explicitly integrates the production-floor work into the tasting room experience. The signature on-site tasting walks guests through six curated spirits and pairs the structured tasting flight with the tactile ritual of hand-labeling and hand-packaging — putting the visitor inside the actual day-to-day finishing work of the operation rather than observing it from across a counter.

The product range covers handcrafted vodka (the flagship — distilled from California-grown grain, the brand's most-distributed product), aromatic gin (a juniper-and-foraged-Sonoma-botanical-forward gin built around Wine Country regional ingredients), an annual limited-release apple brandy (distilled from regional apple orchard fruit during the fall harvest, released in small annual batches), and the bourbon and rye whiskey expressions that anchor the brand's growing aged-whiskey program. The locally-sourced ingredient commitment runs through essentially every product — Sonoma Brothers source grain, fruit, and botanicals from regional Sonoma County and broader Northern California agricultural producers, with the editorial framing throughout positioning the operation as a genuinely Sonoma-anchored agricultural-distilling business rather than a contract or sourced-spirits brand.

The Windsor visitor experience anchors the broader Russian River Valley craft-spirits stop on a Sonoma County wine-country itinerary. The Bell Road location puts Sonoma Brothers within easy driving distance of the surrounding Healdsburg, Windsor, and Russian River Valley wine tasting rooms, with the broader Highway 101 corridor connecting north toward Healdsburg and south toward Santa Rosa. The integrated hand-labeling-and-packaging tasting experience is one of the more genuinely small-craft visitor experiences in the broader Northern California craft-spirits scene — and one of the few craft distillery stops where visitors can leave having put their hands on the bottles they take home.