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Theresa studied biochemistry at Cal Poly and enology at UC Davis, and started at Saintsbury in Carneros. She was research chemist and then winemaker for Joseph Phelps’s Freestone Vineyards on the Sonoma Coast, where her Pinot Noirs and Chardonnays made her name, and she worked a vintage at Domaine de Montille in Burgundy. In early 2012 the San Francisco Chronicle named her a Winemaker to Watch; the same year she joined Gary Farrell.

She stayed twelve years, became Director of Winemaking in 2021, and worked with more than forty vineyards from Sonoma to Santa Barbara. Wine Enthusiast twice nominated her as Winemaker of the Year and put one of her wines at number one on its Top 100 list for 2017. In 2024 she set up her own consulting practice, Heredia Wine Consulting, and stayed on at Gary Farrell as consulting winemaker. Her reputation rests on balance, texture and wines that taste of a particular site, which is exactly what Press Pause asks of her.

Kelly Levison founded Lost Vines and spent about ten years running sales and distribution in fine wine, with a Cornell MBA and qualifications from the WSET and the Court of Master Sommeliers along the way. Theresa and Kelly met in New York in 2018, on a day of market calls made on a Vespa. Press Pause came out of that friendship: Kelly’s sense of what a restaurant list needs, and Theresa’s access to vineyards most small labels can’t get near.

The name is the brief. The winery’s line is “Uncork. Unwind. Savor,” and each label carries a piece of art for its vineyard. Hawk Hill’s is the old oak at the centre of the vineyard with a hawk passing over. Schneider’s is a nautilus, for the fossil shells in its soil. Umino’s is the founder’s name written in Japanese calligraphy, umi for sea and no for field.

Every label is designed to celebrate what makes its vineyard special.

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All three vineyards are in the cool western part of the county, on the sandy soils that make Sonoma’s best Pinot Noir and Chardonnay. Schneider is three miles west of Sebastopol on a slender south-facing ridge above the Bodega Highway, about ten miles from the Pacific. It is an old sea floor; the soil still holds fossilised marine life. The vines are young, about seven years, and the 2024 Chardonnay made 142 cases at 13.7 per cent alcohol.

Hawk Hill is a ridge top high above the village of Freestone, in the West Sonoma Coast, on Goldridge sandy loam with morning fog and ocean wind. Its Pinot Noir was first planted in 1985, and small Pinot makers such as Anthill Farms have bought from it for years. Press Pause made 283 cases at 13.8 per cent; it is the top wine of the range. Umino is in the Sebastopol Hills at the cool, foggy southern end of the Russian River Valley, sandy Goldridge again, and it has grown Pinot Noir since 2000. It is a vineyard small Pinot producers seek out; 275 cases, 14.2 per cent.

Every wine in the range is raised for sixteen months in neutral French Burgundy barrels. That is a long time in old wood, and it is a choice about what to leave out. New oak would have given the wines sweetness and polish early; old barrels give them time and air and let the sand, the fog and the vineyard show. For someone who has made wine at Gary Farrell’s scale, it is also a choice to go small and keep it personal.

The Hawk Hill Pinot is the one I pour first. The Umino, from the fog side of the Sebastopol Hills, is the one people ask about afterwards. Three wines, three places, and nothing done to them that the places don’t need.