Matson Vineyards

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.