Long before Hill Family Estate poured its first glass, this family was already in the dirt. The winery guests visiting today on Solano Avenue did not begin as a tasting room. It began as a promise between two people who wanted to farm this land well enough that, one day, their own name could go on the label. Opening its doors was the fulfillment of that promise, decades in the making.
Decades in the Dirt Before a Single Bottle
Doug and Darci Hill settled on an acre at the northern edge of Yountville in 1981. Their children, Ryan and Carly, grew up in the vineyards and helped tend crops for neighboring farms. For decades, Doug farmed grapes for more than forty Napa Valley wineries, building a reputation as a grower long before Hill Family Estate existed as a brand.
That distinction matters. Plenty of Napa wineries start with a purchased vineyard and a hired winemaker. This one started with a family that had already spent a generation learning what this specific ground, across Atlas Peak, Carneros, and Oak Knoll, could do.
From Growing Grapes to Making Wine
In 2001, after nearly four decades of farming for other labels, the Hill family made the leap from grower to winemaker.
Turning a farming operation into a working winery is not a small pivot. It means building infrastructure, learning a new side of the business, and putting a family name on something the public gets to judge glass by glass. For a family that had spent decades growing fruit that ended up in other people’s bottles, opening a winery of their own was the accomplishment the previous twenty years of farming had been quietly building toward. It was the fulfillment of a dream: pouring wine made from the same ground the family had tended since 1981, under their own name, for the first time.
A Winery Built on the Land We’ve Always Tended
Today, the Estate Winery sits just south of Yountville on Solano Avenue, inside the Yountville appellation. The building is easy to spot, marked by a large “H” made of succulents and framed by two hundred-year-old olive trees at the entrance.
It is a working expression of the same land Doug started farming in 1981. Guests who sit down for a tasting here are drinking wine made from vineyard blocks the family has managed for decades, not fruit sourced to fit a marketing story after the fact. That is the part of this we are proudest of: the winery did not come first. The farming did.
What Guests Experience at the Estate Winery
A visit here is seated and unhurried. Guests taste through a flight of current release wines on the patio, with vineyard rows stretching toward the Mayacamas mountains in the background. The pours draw from twelve vineyard sites across Atlas Peak, Carneros, and Oak Knoll, so each wine in the flight reflects a different piece of the land the family has farmed since the 1980s.
Three appointments run daily, at 10:00am, 12:30pm, and 3:00pm, and each group is capped at eight guests so hosts can keep the pace personal rather than production-line. The tasting fee is $75 per guest, waived with a three-bottle purchase, and families and dogs are welcome throughout, leash required.
Guests who want to stay longer can reserve the property’s picnic area separately, set beneath a stand of century-old oak trees, available in spring, summer, and fall.
Appointments at the Estate Winery are available daily. We would love to host you there and pour something we have been working toward since long before it had a label. Book a tasting to see it for yourself.