History
The family story begins on the Greek island of Lefkada, where Christos Fotinos was born and made wine at home for friends and family. He immigrated to San Francisco in 1908, ran a grocery in the Mission District, and in time bought a home in Sonoma with a small vineyard, pressing its grapes in the garage. His sons scaled the hobby up: George, a civil engineer who worked on the Richmond-San Rafael and Benicia-Martinez bridges, and Tom, who taught at Napa High School from 1957 to 1978 and rose to principal, bought a 26 acre former prune orchard on Old Sonoma Road in Napa's Carneros in 1969 and converted it to vines, eventually 20 acres of Pinot Noir in Pommard, Calera, Dijon and Mariafeld 23. The ranch sold fruit to Robert Mondavi, Saintsbury and Domaine Carneros over the years and sells its Pinot Noir to Mumm's sparkling program today. The family's own label arrived in 2003. George died in 2014, and his daughters, Angela Koros, Margaret Fotinos Morearty and Elaine Fotinos Burrell, now run the operation with their mother Vivian, whose Sonoma Valley acre gives the Chardonnay its name.
The Site
The vineyard lies in the Sonoma Valley AVA on some of the oldest winegrowing ground in the state: Castle Road leads to Bartholomew Park, whose first vines went in around 1832 in the rancho era, after the mission plantings at the pueblo, and where Agoston Haraszthy established Buena Vista in 1857, and Buena Vista itself is a near neighbor. This east-side pocket is sheltered ground, warmer and stiller than the fog-raked Carneros ranch the family farms across the county line, and it typically ripens Chardonnay to a fuller register than the home appellation allows. The planting is about one acre; no public record gives its planting date.
Vines and Blocks
A single small block of Chardonnay, the only Chardonnay the family farms, harvested September 7 in the 2022 vintage. Clone and rootstock are not published. The variety has precedent in the family: a section of the Carneros ranch grew Chardonnay for a time in the 1980s, which makes Vivian's acre a return rather than an experiment.
The Wines
One wine comes off the site: Fotinos Vivian's Vineyard Chardonnay, made by Patrick Saboe at The Wine Foundry, the Napa custom crush house that produces the family's wines. The style is rich without apology: whole cluster pressed, fermented in barrel through full malolactic with battonage twice a week, then aged eleven months in French oak, it shows deep gold color and tropical and stone fruit over butter and vanilla. The 2022, 70 cases, honored Vivian's 85th birthday and carries a photograph of George and Vivian on their 1962 honeymoon as its front label; it took gold at the 2024 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. No other producer bottles the vineyard, and recent vintages have sold out direct from the family.