Brandon Gregory Estate

In 1871 a stagecoach driver named Clark Foss founded a town in Knights Valley and called it Fossville. The geysers on Mount Saint Helena were then one of the sights of the American West, and Foss ran coaches from Calistoga and Healdsburg to his town, where travellers stayed the night before the drive up. Fossville had stables, a blacksmith and a hotel of twenty-five rooms with red plush drapes, verandahs, a piano and a bar. J.P. Morgan, William Randolph Hearst, Ulysses S. Grant and Mark Twain all stayed there.

Foss was famous for driving too fast on the mountain road. Robert Louis Stevenson, on his honeymoon in the Napa Valley, wrote him into The Silverado Squatters. The hotel also had one of the first telephones in the valley: one evening in Calistoga, Stevenson was handed a receiver with Foss on the other end, and, as he wrote, “found myself with nothing in the world to say.” Fossville lasted until 1910, when the motor car finished off the stagecoach.

The hotel’s first name was the Brookshire, and the vineyard bought in 2019 sits on part of the old town, so it carries the name. The ranch around it was also home to the Pratt & Teale Winery, built in 1895 and later split into three parcels. The estate bought back all three, then added the 500-acre Hafey Ranch next door: 565 acres in all, most of it oak, native grass and conservation land, with a cattle operation and a grape-growing business beside the vineyard. On the second ranch, Helena Vista, stands the stone front of George Hood’s winery, the first in Knights Valley, built in 1878 and rebuilt there with its original keystone.

Launches his team with small regard to human life or the doctrine of probabilities.

Robert Louis Stevenson on Clark Foss, The Silverado Squatters

Brookshire is forty acres between 483 and 683 feet. Its soils come from the old volcano above it. The northern blocks are Los Robles clay loam: gravelly, very deep and free-draining, weathered from basalt and andesite. The southern blocks sit on Red Hill clay loam that is 37 to 50 per cent gravel, mixed with particles of tuff and broken rhyolite. Knights Valley is warm by day and cooled in the evening by air off the ocean, and the combination of heat, stone and drainage is what Bordeaux varieties want.

The vineyard’s history runs in layers. After Duckhorn’s planting, the Summers family bought it in 1987 and added more Bordeaux varieties, taking it to 26.6 acres. Brandon Gregory planted another thirteen acres after 2019: Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot, Sauvignon Blanc and a little Chardonnay. The Cabernet Franc that anchors Illation comes from a block of about a third of an acre.

Two more vineyards are coming. Helena Vista, on the 621-acre ranch the couple bought first, was planted in 2022 on twenty-two acres: sandstone-based Suther-Laughlin loam on the western blocks, a gravelly alluvial fan of Cortina loam on the east, and Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot and Syrah in the rows. Dean York, two and a half acres of Cabernet Sauvignon round the family’s house in St. Helena, was planted in 2020 and is set aside for a Dean York Cabernet under the Illation label.

Julien Fayard grew up in a wine family in Provence and made his first wines there, rosé at the family estate. In Bordeaux he worked at Château Lafite Rothschild and Château Smith Haut Lafitte before moving to the Napa Valley, where he spent several years as Philippe Melka’s director of winemaking before setting up on his own. He holds a master’s in winemaking from Toulouse and an MBA from UC Davis. The estate describes his aim as wines with an identity of their own, made from what is particular to each site.

His method here is plain. The Brandon Gregory wines are single-estate Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Sauvignon Blanc, each from chosen blocks at Brookshire, picked by block on separate days (the 2022 Cabernet came in on 17 and 26 September, the Merlot on 9 September). The reds go into French oak; the first Illation, the 2019, spent twenty-one months in barrel, three-quarters of it new, and then fourteen more in bottle before release. The Sauvignon Blanc is raised in stainless steel and picked early, on 26 August in 2024, and it tastes of that: high-toned, citrus and chalk.

Illation is Fayard’s barrel selection: the best lots of each vintage, blended to show the year and the vineyard together. In 2022 that meant 75 per cent Cabernet Sauvignon and 25 per cent Cabernet Franc. The farming is now in the hands of Hardin Vineyard Management, founded in 2021 by Matt Hardin, whose family has farmed Napa land since 1849.

Brandon Muller grew up in suburban Orange County, studied business at USC and worked in commercial real estate finance. Gregory Roberts, his husband, grew up in Northern California around vineyards and farms, then moved south to surf and work in hospitality. When Brandon’s job took them to San Francisco, Gregory showed him Sonoma and Napa, and they decided they would one day have a home there. It took ten years.

In 2017 they bought 621 acres of undeveloped land in Knights Valley, with no plan to grow grapes. Studying how best to use it, they found it was good vineyard ground, and designed Helena Vista. The next year they made their first wine with home-winemaking equipment and the help of a Napa winemaker. That was enough to commit them: in 2019 came Brookshire, and the estate. The 2019 Kincade Fire burned most of the buildings at Helena Vista that autumn, including the old barn on Foss’s stagecoach road; they rebuilt it as a copy of the original.

The reason to drink these wines is the vineyard. Brookshire spent four decades in other people’s bottles, some of them famous, and now a winemaker with Bordeaux training takes the best of it and bottles it under its own name, in quantities measured in barrels. That is what to expect: dark, mineral Cabernet and Merlot from volcanic gravel, made to age, and a Sauvignon Blanc for the years you wait.