How a Wooden Duck Migrated From the California Wetlands to a Wine Label

Along the sun-dappled hills of Sonoma County, where salt air from the Pacific breezes through rolling vineyards and the soil sings with centuries of winemaking history, great wine waits to be made. And at Decoy, a winery known for its distinguished portfolio of California wines, that terroir combines with a deep level of craftsmanship, to make for accessible but elegant bottles that burst with the delicious traces of California’s land.

Decoy has become an iconic brand thanks to the great wine inside each bottle, but it’s also instantly recognizable thanks to the duck that sits proudly atop its label—and gives the brand its name. This charming mallard floats stately and serene on a white background, with a jaunty air: just below his tucked wing is a flash of dazzling green, which seems to hint at a playful element to these well-designed wines. Look closely, and you’ll see this duck is, yes, a decoy: a carved wooden animal meant to lure in the real deal. Hunters have been using decoys to attract ducks since the time of the ancient Egyptians, making the practice just a few thousand years newer than that of winemaking. But there are still many parallels between the craft of decoy carving and the craft of winemaking; both celebrate the land and its abundance. They also make a particularly harmonious pair when you consider that duck has been a particularly popular stalwart on California tables, pairing well with local Cabernets and Pinots. And at Decoy, just as these wines offer unexpected depth and verve—providing that aha! moment past their initial impressions—so too does this decoy play with expectations.

The duck on the label has a real-life counterpart, which still lives in a display case in the Duckhorn Vineyards Estate House in St. Helena, California. The story goes that Dan Duckhorn, who founded Duckhorn Vineyards in 1976 and began making Decoy Wines in 1985, was a serious collector of decoys. So when Duckhorn decided to call this new line of wines “Decoy”—for the way that they might lure in drinkers with their accessible but elegant, well-designed blends—he knew he needed a duck on the label. Just as a carved wooden duck carries the barely-perceptible, but still present, trace of the smooth hand of its maker, honed over decades of practice, so too does winemaking rely on deep knowledge of process and land.

Winemaking, like art, rewards the trailblazing, and even on a visual level, this first label was a bold move: at the time, most wines simply held the names of their winemakers on the label, maybe with a flashy font or a dramatic color. But from its earliest years, Decoy has been playing by its own rules, and to great success. The duck has remained on the label, and craftsmanship has remained central to the wines that the label announces.

Decoy began with a single red blend in 1985. Dan Duckhorn wanted to make a wine with an accessible price point but high quality, and so he used grapes grown for his main-label vintages, blending them into something he lovingly referred to as a “Tuesday night wine”. (Who doesn’t need a great bottle of wine on a Tuesday night?) Just as the original Decoy label has been refined to reflect a more modern style, Decoy has expanded to include a diverse array of varietals. Perhaps the most well-known is their Cabernet Sauvignon, which drinkers appreciate for its complex and structured fruit profile. But the brand also makes a soft, lightly herbal Pinot Noir; a vibrant and tropical fruit-forward Sauvignon Blanc; and that California classic, Chardonnay, which is silky and delicately balanced. All of these reflect the soil and the winds of California: Decoy works exclusively with grapes grown along the California coastline, where cooler temperatures, steep hillsides, coastal soil, and foggy mornings make for a unique growing environment.

For a great wine, you need great grapes, and at the heart of Decoy's philosophy is a profound respect for Sonoma County's diverse terroirs. Decoy uses grapes from a mix of Estate vineyards and top grower vineyards. This means that they grow some of their own grapes on the rolling, sun-dappled vineyards that they own, and they buy some grapes from other top-tier growers in the area. This allows the brand to invest in their own viticulture, while also benefiting from the great brain trust of growers in the area. It also means that they can work with people who specialize in particular grape varietals, like Chardonnay and Zinfandel. The brand's estate vineyards—Ridgeline and Brownell—are prime examples of this commitment to California’s grapes. Ridgeline, perched on the slopes of Oak Mountain in Alexander Valley, offers steep elevations and rocky soils that yield exceptional Bordeaux-style varietals. In contrast, Brownell Vineyard, located on the valley floor, benefits from ancient gravel and sand alluvial soils, which among other things produce the brand’s renowned Cabernet Sauvignon.​

While the grapes are the most important factor in the winemaking process, they’re just the beginning. Just as carving a decoy requires picking the right wood before meticulously carving and painting that wood in order to successfully lure live ducks, a great wine must be made with meticulous care. At Decoy, the winemakers ferment each grape varietal individually, rather than batch-fermenting all grapes that will be used for a single blend, which means that they can calibrate the flavor of each aspect of a wine, before bringing those aspects together in harmony for the final bottle. Often, the smoothest wines are those that have been made in the most meticulous, thoughtful ways.

Across the decades, Decoy has found new ways to refine its commitment to craftsmanship. In 2007, the brand was looking to redesign their label, and wanted to find an updated decoy image that spoke to the sophistication of the growing portfolio as well as the folk art traditions of the area. They hired local artist Michael Allard, and for their cover model, they looked in-house. Two of Dan Duckhorn’s most prized possessions were a pair of carved wooden pintails that he’d acquired in the late ‘90s. These had been carved by Richard “Fresh Air Dick” Janson, a local legend who had carved decoys in the early half of the 20th century aboard a rundown boat moored in the marshes of Sonoma Creek—just 25 miles from St. Helena as the duck flies. Janson worked for many years as a ship’s carpenter, and retired early to live on his boat and carve; among decoy collectors, his name is revered as one of the form’s greatest artists. They say that he carved his ducks each day with a small hatchet as his hand-cranked phonograph played. While today, most decoys are factory-made, his decoys were patiently carved out of the region’s redwood with hand tools, and those that remain are now smoothed by a century of age. The grain of the wood is still visible under the careful brushstrokes that transformed the inert sculpture into something lifelike. So the image that now announces the Decoy brand speaks to the Californian legacy of craft, hard work, and respect for the land.