Hill Family Estate is proud to welcome Nalani Jo Kubilos and Heather Donoviel to our Yountville tasting room.
Heather, our new tasting room manager, was raised in Napa, and comes to us with years of wine and hospitality experience. After getting her degree in Japanese Studies from UCSB, she opened a sushi bar/restaurant and then a restaurant/nightclub in Santa Barbara. Later she returned to Napa to be close to her parents and to deepen her knowledge of wine. She loves to cook for friends and family, especially for her daughter Nicole, and can often be found working in her garden or biking through the Napa Valley. In the winter she is known to trade in the bicycle for a pair of skis.
Nalani Jo comes to wine by way of science. As a biology major and chemistry minor who started to get intrigued with wine by visiting the tasting rooms of Lodi and Santa Barbara, she took the plunge and worked a harvest in an analytical wine lab for a Napa Valley winery. While the Napa and wine bugs got into her, she longed for more human contact, so she has (to our great delight) found herself working as a wine educator in our Yountville tasting room.
She credits her own great experiences in tasting rooms as models for what to bring to our guests and club members, and likes working for a small, family-owned, farming focused company such as ours. Naturally, her interest in wine spills over to an interest in food, and she enjoys cooking and eating. Tamales, gorditos, Indian, and Italian cuisine (especially pasta) might be found gracing her table. Not content to stick with eating and drinking all the time, she can be found on her time off hiking, bike riding, dancing and painting.
Please come into our Yountville tasting room and meet Heather and Nalani Jo. They will be happy to pour you some outstanding Hill Family wine and to share stories about wine, food, and the great Napa Valley!