The Piña Brothers
Larry Piña
Managing Partner
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Davie Piña
Partner
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Ranndy Piña
Partner
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John Piña
Partner
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The Piña Staff
Anna Monticelli Winemaker
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Macario Montoya
Assistant Winemaker
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Alvaro Labon
Wine Educator
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Tom Shirmang
Wine Educator
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Michael Laidlaw
Wine Educator
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Clair Palmer
Wine Educator
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PIÑA NAPA VALLEY: Our History
The Piña name (it means “fruit of the pine” in Spanish) is familiar as one of the most respected vineyard management companies in the Napa Valley---farming prestigious estates including Pahlmeyer,O’Shaughnessy, Cafaro, Dina (Cimarossa Vineyards), Emilio’s Terrace, O’Brien Family Winery, Gemstone, Howell At the Moon, Hughes, Johnson (Bisou), Kapcsandy, Roy Estate, Sawyer, Showket, Teaderman Family, Vogt Vineyards and Winston Hill (Frank Family Vineyards).
The family has been making its home in the Napa Valley since 1856 when their progenitor Bluford Stice led a wagon train into the valley from Missouri. The Piñas’ great-great-grandfather Bluford Stice’s son Lafayette was a farmer and winemaker, owning vineyards where Stice Lane is today, just south of St. Helena; he was a leader in the wine industry of Napa Valley at the turn of the twentieth century as the winemaker at Inglenook Winery.
The Piñas’ great-grandfather Charles Glos homesteaded on Howell Mountain in the 1880s, almost in sight of the Buckeye Vineyard: their children literally walked 6 miles to school in St. Helena. Charles’s son Charles married Mabel Stice, Lafayette’s daughter and settled in Rutherford.
The family’s paternal history includes grandparents who left Malaga, Spain in 1911 to work in Hawaii for promises of gold and land and subsequently came to California where they settled on a farm in Rutherford in the 1920s.The grandfather of the current generation of Piñas owned a vineyard on the Silverado Trail near the current winery. Their father was the vineyard manager for a property which is today Plump Jack Winery. On the side he had clients for whom he managed their vineyards and by 1960 he went out on his own, opening John Piña Jr. & Sons. At that time vineyard and winery owners wanted ‘clean’ fruit which met primarily only the Brix requirements of a given winery. You grew as many grapes as you could, getting them as ripe as possible. This approach held true through the 1960s, where reps from wineries would only appear at harvest time and not visit the vineyards during the rest of the year. By the early 1970s the wineries became more involved and their requirements became more complex; by the late 1970s, the Piñas saw big-winery winemakers visiting their vineyards quarterly and today the family now participates with these winemakers in making all the important viticultural decisions throughout the growing season. They have seen the parameters for grapes become much more stringent and much less quantity-oriented. The grapes the family has farmed have changed in these decades also—in the 1960s they were farming Alicante, Petite Syrah, Palomino, Chenin Blanc, Sauvignon Vert, which are seldom seen today. Fundamentally the Piñas now are masters of a huge universe of complex variables--- soil, rootstock, clones, trellises, water and more. Today they can use infrared photography to analyze whether a cover crop should be disked, for example. They have demonstrated their leadership as viticulturalists and now have extended that expertise to their own small portfolio of single-vineyard wines from their own vineyards.
