# Brown Estate

Brown Estate Vineyards is a Vineyard and wine brand located in the St. Helena area of Napa Valley, California, United States. Brown Estate produces multiple varieties of wine including Zinfandel, Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, and Petite Sirah. Brown Estate Vineyards was founded in 1995 by siblings Deneen, David, and Coral Brown. The Vineyard produced its first Napa Valley Zinfandel in 1996. Brown Estate Vineyards is the first and only Black-owned Estate Winery in Napa Valley. The Brown family started in the industry by farming grapes and selling them to established winemakers.

## Early history

In 1980, Jamaican-born Bassett Brown and Panamanian-born Marcela Abrahams Brown acquired 450 acres (1.8 km$^2$) in the Chiles Valley AVA of Napa Valley. Abandoned ten years prior, the land and its two structures—an 1859 stone and redwood barn and an 1885 Queen Anne Victorian home—were derelict. The senior Browns cut roads and installed plumbing and electricity, a restoration for which they received an award from the Napa County Historical Society. In 1985, they planted their first vineyard, approximately 9 ha (22 acres) of zinfandel. The Chiles Valley microclimate, characterized by extreme temperature shifts throughout each day, suited the cultivation of zinfandel grapes. The Brown family's fruit soon gained popularity among zinfandel producers such as Green & Red and T-Vine Cellars, who purchased Brown Estate fruit for many years. The Browns also sold Cabernet Sauvignon to the famed Mike Grgich. It was through a series of apprenticeships with winemakers who were working with his fruit that David Brown, who by then had been farming his family's vineyards for five years, began learning the art and science of winemaking.
In the mid-1990s, due to rising demand for their fruit, Deneen and David, who were both residing on the vineyard property, decided to produce wine under their label. Because they had no winery facility on site, they secured a custom crush contract with Rombauer Vineyards in Saint Helena, and for six years, they produced their wines at the Rombauer facility. On January 29, 2000, Brown Estate debuted their first two vintages of Napa Valley Zinfandel, 1996 and 1997, at the annual Zinfandel Advocates and Producers (ZAP) tasting at Fort Mason in San Francisco. ZAP is the largest single varietal wine tasting event in the world, and the Brown offerings were well received by the trade and public alike. Simultaneously, in the January 31, 2000 issue of the Wine Spectator, the 1997 Brown Estate Zinfandel received a score of 91 points.

## Fire

In June 2000, a fire broke out at the warehouse facility where Brown's wine library and a recently bottled 1998 vintage were stored. With the exception of sixteen bottles - two that went to wine critic Robert M. Parker, Jr. for review, two that went to Christie's for auction, and twelve that the Browns had stored at home - all of their 1998 zinfandel was destroyed, as were the remaining cases of their first two vintages. The lost 1998 vintage left the Browns out of the zinfandel market for a year, a setback that was mitigated by the help of restaurant and retail accounts who held space on their wine lists and shelves for the next vintage of Brown Zin. In response to the fire, the Browns accelerated the release of their 1999 Napa Valley zinfandel, which they showed at ZAP in 2001. The previous month, in December 2000, Parker gave the Brown 1998 zinfandel a score of 90, noting that his review was "of academic interest only" since all of the wine had perished in the fire. The loss of the 1998 vintage has kept Brown Estate's Napa Valley zinfandel bottlings on a perennially early release schedule.

## Winery and cave construction

As production grew, Brown expanded beyond the Rombauer facility. Winery construction began in summer of 2002, and by September of that year, a derelict barn was repurposed as an on-site wine production facility. Beginning in April 2004, Brown Estate added a wine cave by blasting through a granite hillside with dynamite.

## Milestones

In November 2010, the Browns released the world's first hashtagged wine, their 2009 Napa Valley Zinfandel. Subsequent vintages of this wine bore the #brownzin hashtag.
In April 2017, Brown Downtown Napa opened on downtown Napa's First Street corridor.