The Lee family is pictured at their winery in Santa Rosa, Calif. From left, Adam, Amber, Christian, Truett and Dianna.
Dianna and Adam met while working for a national department store in Dallas. As a wine buyer for the company, Adam had some knowledge of the wine industry. He also had a dream – one he shared with Dianna – of being on the other side of the business: formulating and creating wines of their own. The Texans moved to California. “Adam and I got jobs working together in a winery’s tasting room,” Dianna said. “We started talking to winemakers and soaked up every bit of knowledge we could about winemaking and viticulture.” With a unique business model and a firm understanding of terms like tannin, lignification and véraison, the Lees’ dream became a reality when they released their first Pinot Noir in 1994. “We put an ad in a newspaper to buy grapes by the ton,” Dianna said. “There was no way we could have afforded to purchase a vineyard. We made our first wine at the winery where Adam and I were working.” They weren’t the first winemakers without their own vineyard, but the Lees were among the first to source fruit from what are now considered California’s top Pinot
Noir vineyards, according to Wine Spectator magazine. The Lees have become known for turning out some of the most coveted singlevineyard wines in California and have helped elevate the status of wine regions such as Santa Rita Hills, Sonoma Coast and Santa Lucia Highlands. “Our biggest accomplishment is our consistency of producing high-quality wines and our ability to maintain our relationships with our growers,” Dianna said. “We have developed a reputation of creating high-quality wines that reflect their diverse geography. Adam and I make several small lots of wine, and we manage to give each of these lots our complete attention.” In the early years, before children and before seeing any return on their investments, the Lees
saved money by sleeping in tents near the vineyards. “Getting fruit from a wide variety of sources helped us learn how to make wine,” Dianna said. More than 900 miles now separate their southernmost grape source in the Santa Rita Hills Appellation in California and their northernmost vineyard in the Willamette Valley in Oregon. “The weather would have to be horrible from Santa Barbara all the way to the northern Willamette Valley in Oregon to really cause a problem for us,” Dianna said. Winemaking begins in the vineyard, and the Lees contract with growers to buy grapes by the acre. Dianna and Adam are in charge of specific rows in some vineyards, and are hands-on in managing the crop.
“E verything we do is an attempt to make certain that the character of the vineyard
Fall 2011
shows through in the wine. It’s not about which is the best. It is ultimately about their differences and their uniqueness.” 23