Cathiard Vineyard Red Wine Founding Brothers Napa Valley 2021

In 1885, brothers James and William Rennie, immigrants from Scotland, purchased a property in Napa Valley, planting sixty acres of grapes spanning the Rutherford and St. Helena AVAs. They built an innovative stone gravity-flow winery, inspired by their heritage as descendants of British engineers, including their uncle Sir John Rennie, famed for completing the London Bridge. The Rennie Brothers were pioneers in the industry, being the first in California to use a gasoline-powered engine for grape crushing, and they developed some of the most well-extracted vintages of their time. However, their winemaking journey was cut short by a devastating fire and the spread of phylloxera, which led to the closure of the winery in 1920 with the onset of Prohibition. The once-thriving estate fell into disuse and became one of Napa Valley's "ghost wineries," intact but untouched for many years. In 1933, Louis Martini purchased the property, building a large wood house where he lived with his family in the early '40s. The property changed hands again in the late '70s, being sold to the Komes-Garvey family, and most recently to Florence and Daniel Cathiard in January 2020. The Cathiards, former high-level ski champions and attendees of the 1969 Woodstock festival, fell in love with the estate's biodiversity. Their respect for nature, already a cornerstone of their Bordeaux properties like Château Smith Haut Lafitte, is now expressed at Cathiard Vineyard, where their passion for nature and the arts continues to flourish.