This is wine reporter Lucy Hodgman, taking over the newsletter while Jess Lander is on vacation.<\/p>\n
In 2024, James Hall bought back his winery<\/a>, Patz & Hall, eight years after selling it to wine conglomerate Ste. Michelle Wine Estates – a rare reversal of the California wine industry’s recent consolidation trend<\/a>.<\/p>\n Hall had maintained ownership of the winery’s Sonoma House tasting room and stayed on to oversee production of its famous slate of single-vineyard California Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. But the buyback, he said, invited him to rethink what Patz & Hall could be.<\/p>\n “Our old tasting experience was very educational,” Hall said. “We realized that more and more people want to come and have a glass of wine and sit with their friends and enjoy the space. So we’ve skewed closer to something that we think people are going to love to hang out in and feel comfortable.”<\/p>\n Patz & Hall’s new tasting room is set to open today in a single-story Arts and Crafts-style building at 596 1st St. East in Sonoma. Once a doctor’s office, the building most recently served as a tasting and administrative space for Stone Edge Farm Estate Vineyards & Winery, which bought<\/a> Patz & Hall’s old tasting room on 8th St. East this past summer.<\/p>\n The switch gave Patz & Hall a more modest location that’s also more central – it’s about a block from Sonoma Plaza, situated on a leafy corner where several people paused their walks one morning last week to ask about the tasting room’s opening day. The space is designed around these kinds of informal run-ins, said Gus Slagle, Patz & Hall’s vice president of marketing. Patio tables and chairs are arranged in the front yard, a few feet steps off the sidewalk, and a porch swing hangs by the front door.<\/p>\n Inside, neutral-toned couches and chairs are positioned close to the windows, where gauzy curtains filter the light. There’s a separate room for private gatherings, with a wooden table and the homey air of a dining room mostly used for Thanksgiving dinners. The tasting room, which seats about 24 people inside and 18 people outside, is designed like a “higher concept” family home, Slagle said. “We’re bullish on the by-the-glass, more relaxed kind of experiences. We can do more formalized tastings, but it’s a dandy place to enjoy a glass of wine with friends.”<\/p>\n The most basic tasting at the new location will be complimentary for the first month, then start at $20 per person, with prices running up to $75. The winery also has other events in the works, including monthly “Vinyl and Vino” nights and dinners featuring Hall in conversation with guests from other fields.<\/p>\n Even if its tasting experience has become less formal, Hall has promised to keep “the history and all that in our back pocket, if they’re interested.” He founded the winery in 1988 alongside his business partner Donald Patz and their wives, Anne Moses and Heather Patz. Since then, he’s staked the business on close relationships with winegrowing families, sourcing grapes from vineyards including Chenoweth Ranch in West Sonoma and Hyde Vineyards in Napa.<\/p>\n Hall stayed on as winemaker after the Washington based Ste. Michelle Estates purchased the winery in 2016. The eight years of corporate ownership were a “great interlude,” he said, during which he was largely left undisturbed to make wine and cultivate relationships with growers. But when the winery was put on the market again, Hall had a terrifying vision of it going to a different conglomerate, one with less interest in preserving the partnerships he had worked so hard to build.<\/p>\n “With the chance to buy it back, I went from, ‘Why in the world would I want to do that?’ to ‘Wouldn’t it be interesting to think about,’ to ‘Oh my God, we’ve really got to do this,'” Hall said. In the two years since, he’s brought on two new partners, rehired much of the staff from the winery’s 8th Street tasting room and whittled the number of wines in rotation from 21 to 18. “I think Patz & Hall is in a great spot,” he said. “Being able to reassert our family, small-winery ethos in an era of consolidation and huge corporate movement – it’s contrarian, but it’s also very attractive.”<\/p>\n Hall is among a small class of winemakers who’ve been able to buy their wineries back from large conglomerates in recent years, enabled in part by the wine industry’s broader downturn. As major wine companies have downsized<\/a>, winemakers, including James MacPhail<\/a>, Phil Hurst<\/a> of Truett-Hurst and Douglas Stuart<\/a> of Breggo, have become competitive buyers.<\/p>\n Although Hall has had ownership over his winery back for more than two years, Slagle sees the opening of the new tasting room as the last step to fully reclaiming it. “Everything in this place, from the experience to the furnishings to the decor, has been refracted through our own sensibilities,” he said. “There’s nothing inherited about it.”<\/p>\n Subscribe<\/p>\n There’s more to San Francisco with the Chronicle. Subscribe today for just 25\u00a2.<\/a><\/p>\n