Blending Others’ Wines Turns Passion into a Solid Business

P. Harrell Wines 2019 Three Fifteen Zinfandel

Paula Harrell fell in love with wine culture while on a student exchange program in Madrid. So, when she returned to San Francisco, she started venturing north into Napa, meeting winery owners and winemakers, building a network of friends and refining her palate over the years. Eventually, she did what nearly every wine lover does—wonder whether she could make wine herself.

Harrell started her winemaking career in a rather unorthodox fashion. “I got into this bad habit of blending other people’s wines at the dinner table,” she recalled. “My family would get so mad at me because we’d go out to dinner and I’d order tastes of different things to try, and then I felt that they were good, but two of them would be better together.”

Her uncle, a wine connoisseur himself, was one of the first to recognize her talent. Even though he’d rib her for blending finished wines at the dinner table and discourage her from the practice, he soon joked that she might benefit from a different career path.

“He goes, ‘You actually have a knack for this. Everything that you’ve put together is better than anything else that we’ve been drinking, but might I suggest you make your own damn wine and stop blending other people’s?’” Harrell said. “When he said that, literally this light bulb went off my head and I was like, ‘Ah, that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to make my own wine.’”

Using the connections made through her many visits to the Napa Valley over the prior 10 years, she researched and eventually found a place to do custom crush, grapes for sale, and a winemaker to help her produce wine to her exact specifications.

This was back in 2009, when finding facilities, especially in her hometown of San Francisco, wasn’t so simple, and was a long, arduous process she had to face in addition to the usual challenges of starting a wine company. Thankfully, Harrell could rely on her network of not just wine professionals, but those in the real estate and mortgage business—the industry she had spent her career in. She could reach out to restaurants, retailers and event planners to help sell her wines.

“I would love to create a handbook for somebody who wants to get into this business in this way because putting all those pieces together was just challenging,” she said. “I mean, it took me some years.”

Now, Harrell has hit her stride, increasing production from 500 cases to nearly 3,000 cases, and expanded from two bottlings to five. She has contracts with Chase Stadium in San Francisco as well as an airline, and wine club membership has quadrupled since she started. Harrell said that all the hard work at the beginning, even trying to figure out which licenses she would need, was worth the trouble as she has now seen her dream realized.

Through all this, she remains immensely humble and always finds ways to bring her family into the business. Her Three Fifteen Zinfandel, a blend of 85 percent Dry Creek Zinfandel and 15 percent Petite Sirah, is a direct reference to 315 Santa Ana Avenue in San Francisco—the home she grew up in.

“315 was this place that was a melting pot of friends and family and people building genuine relationships and supporting one another,” Harrell described. Her mother, an immigrant from Panama, and her father, a transplant from Oklahoma, would sponsor family members looking to move to the United States, so it always felt like a full house. “It just seemed like it was a fitting name for that wine—and my favorite wine is Zinfandel and Petite Sirah.”

Harrell has lofty goals for the future. When she makes her first Cabernet Sauvignon, she wants to name it “Gregory”, for the uncle who inadvertently inspired her. “I’ll continue to go after big contracts, more airlines,” she added. “I still want to stay a boutique-ish wine company. I don’t need to be the biggest wine company in the world. That’s not really my goal. I’d like to be able to still have a personal touch to it.”