© Matson Vineyards 2021. All Rights Reserved
Oscar Matson, the patriarch of Shasta County’s
oldest bonded winery, was not always a
winemaker. That happened by chance. Before
winemaking, he spent several years teaching
modern languages—French, German, Spanish,
and English—at Shasta College in Redding and,
with his wife Stella, raising a family of four boys.
In the 1960s, perhaps thinking of his boys and
his retirement, he seized the opportunity, with
two other families, to purchase eighty-one acres
of land adjacent to Redding. The group divided
this land on Arapaho Drive near the bridge over
Salmon Creek into three twenty-seven acre lots,
one lot for each family. The family’s portion is
now thirteen acres and the site of Matson
Vineyards.
Gary Matson, whose green thumb and community
organizing skills helped create the community
gardens in Happy Valley and launch the Redding
Farmers’ Market, planted some Colombard grapes
on his Happy Valley property, and Oscar’s extra
bedroom soon housed their fermentation. In the
‘90s, Gary and his partner were murdered on
their Happy Valley property in a senseless hate
crime, but Oscar and Roger credit Gary for the
adventurous spirit behind their wine odyssey,
Oscar referring to Gary as a universalisch, a term
that brings together his agricultural, community,
and musical talents. A horticulturist educated at
Davis, Gary noticed the good soil on the Arapaho
Drive property and planted grapes when the
house was built in 1981.
Today the operation of the vineyard is in the
hands of the youngest son, Roger. After
graduation from high school, Roger’s first choice
for higher education would have been a program
related to wine-making, but he somehow thought
that only wine-making families with roots in the
Napa Valley gained entry to that route. So he
went to UC Santa Cruz, “willing to brave the
winds” with an undeclared major taking courses
like linear algebra, physics and organic
chemistry. This prepared him to complete a B.S.
in fermentation science from the University of
California at Davis in 1980. Roger honed his
winemaking skills in Mendocino County with
wineries Olson (later Conrad and now Fife),
Parson’s Creek, and Kendall-Jackson. Roger
figures prominently in what Greg Butler, the
President of the Shasta-Cascade Viticulture
Association, identifies as the uniqueness of
Matson Vineyards: its blended wines.
