Sphaerics and Serres Ranch Wine Dinner - April 19, 2026

Sphaerics and Serres Ranch Wine Dinner

 Special Guests:

Brian Ball, owner of Sphaerics

and

Taylor Serres and Guido Murnig, owners of Serres Ranch

Sunday, April 19, 2026

5:00 pm

$150.00 per person plus tax

(gratuity is included)

At a private home near Taylor's Wine Shop in North Raleigh

Join us for Sunday Dinner...Sonoma Style!  We're proud to welcome Sphaerics and Serres Ranch to our North Raleigh neighborhood.  The stars aligned, and we have some of our favorite wine personalities in town on the same day!  

We will sit down to a flight of Sphaerics' three award-winning Chardonnays as Brian describes the unique nature of their brand and what makes these Chardonnays so highly acclaimed.  Brian's wife Laura is their winemaker, and her wines are nothing short of exquisite.  

We will dine on a Sunday Dinner buffet created by Chef Tom Armstrong of Rogue Provisions (many of you know him from being the Chef and GM at Vinnie's Steakhouse for 19 years).  Come say hi to Chef Tom and enjoy this gorgeous Sunday Dinner with friends.

On to the reds...Taylor Serres and Guido will guide us through a flight of their gorgeous and bold Serres Ranch red wines and share with you the stories of their centennial ranch in the heart of Sonoma Valley.  As Napa Valley prices continue to soar astronomically, we feel these Serres Ranch wines truly rival in character and quality while remaining some of the best value red wines we have found.

Dinner Wines

Sphaerics "overline" Carneros Chardonnay 2024  $92*

Sphaerics "on days and nights" Russian River Chardonnay 2024  $110*

Sphaerics "if and only if" Upper Barn Vyd Chardonnay 2024  $185*

Serres Ranch Katherine Malbec, Sonoma Valley 2022  $85*

Serres Ranch Watriss Bordeaux Blend, Sonoma Valley2021  $75*

At Sphaerics, we are a husband-and-wife team of wine industry veterans, Brian Ball and Laura Jones. The wines are made by Laura, who fine-tuned her Chardonnay and Pinot Noir winemaking skills during a 5-year tenure at Aubert and a stint at Domaine Armand Rousseau. Brian manages the business and sales for Sphaerics. We are dedicated to crafting world-class Chardonnay from sites of distinction in California, and our 2023 vintage earned 94-99 points across the board from 8 different reviewers.  Careful vineyard selection, meticulous attention to detail, and adherence to traditional winemaking practices are the pillars of our winemaking philosophy. The results of this process are wines that emanate energy and substance. We seek to produce wines that simultaneously pique one’s intellectual side while providing ultimate pleasure to the senses. According to Vinous: The brainchild of husband and wife Laura Jones and Brian Ball (winemaker and estate director at Skipstone, respectively), Sphaerics is one of the most exciting new projects I encountered during this visit to the region. Jones cut her teeth working at Domaine Armand Rousseau in Burgundy and with Mark Aubert in Napa/Sonoma. She’s a deft hand with Chardonnay, clearly taking a page from Aubert’s book in the sense that her wines are richly textured and supremely polished. The first two releases of Sphaerics, 2022 and 2023, comprise only Chardonnay. Wines are whole-cluster pressed and spontaneously fermented in barrel, followed by a traditional Burgundian-style élevage of 11 months in barrel followed by five to six months in stainless steel—about as straightforward as it gets.
The flagship bottling (If And Only If) hails from the oldest section of the famed Upper Barn Vineyard at the Jackson family’s Alexander Mountain estate, a plot that originally went into Peter Michael’s Mon Plaisir for many years. Upper Barn is one of the most singular Chardonnay sites in California, and that certainly translates here. Two other sites, one in Carneros and one in Russian River Valley, round out the portfolio. The 2024 vintage sees the addition of a Pinot Noir to the stable, while the 2025 vintage yielded the first wines off the estate vineyard that Jones and Ball recently purchased in Freestone-Occidental.
And the wines themselves? They’re excellent. Compellingly rich and layered but weightless and restrained, these are classy Chardonnays through and through. The 2024s, tasted from tank a week prior to bottling, are riveting, pointing to a refined approach that benefits from slightly less new oak across the board and an extra bump of precision. Don’t miss these wines.