Grace Family Vineyards

Grace Family Vineyards has a strong and compelling claim to being California's original cult wine, and we are delighted to welcome this impressive estate to our portfolio in 2024. It was the mid-1970s that Hawaiian-born stockbroker Bill Grace and his wife Ann fell in love with a run-down Victorian property in St. Helena, and in 1976, on the advice of some friends, they planted an acre of Cabernet Sauvignon vines using cuttings from the legendary Bosché vineyard in Rutherford.

The inaugural vintage was 1978. It was picked by friends and family, and transported to Caymus, where the owner there, Charles Wagner, tasted the fruit and declared that this should be made as a standalone wine.

For Bill Grace, wine has always offered an opportunity to do good, and the estate has supported hundreds of causes across the world under the umbrella of the Grace Family Foundation. On one such trip to Nepal in 1997, he met a young American student, struggling to decide whether to continue with her medical studies, who was delighted to see a bottle of Grace Family Vineyards on his table at the world’s highest bakery. Some 17 years later, this student, who, following this meeting decided to follow her passion for wine, and having worked at some of California’s best estates, as well as in Priorat, became winemaker at Grace Family Vineyards. Her name is Helen Kaplinger, and in 2023 she was named Antonio Galloni’s winemaker of the year.

In 2019 the estate was purchased by Californian Kathryn Green, and her British husband Jeremy, ushering a new era for Grace Family Vineyards. Bill and Ann still live in the house at the heart of the property, and the philosophy behind the winery, and the team making the wines, remains constant. 

The estate yields just 1,500 cases in a good year, from their biodynamically farmed vineyards. The Grace Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon comes from that original vineyard, with just three acres planted in two separate plots. The lower of the two was replanted using massal selection in 2017, selecting only the healthiest vines from the original planting. Tannic and intense, this is a remarkably serious wine. The Cornelius Grove vineyard has been part of the Grace Family portfolio since 2016. The soils on its terraces are loamier, and it’s planted with some of the oldest Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa, dating back seventy years or more, and makes a slightly softer wine, that’s incredibly charming. Meanwhile, Reliquus is a blend of the two vineyards, and is seen as the perfect way to introduce the wines of the estate to a wider audience.

These are Cabernet Sauvignons of the very highest order, that display all the detailing and precision that you’d expect from Helen’s exacting winemaking standards.