Buena Vista Winery — the first premium winery in California — is a must-see destination.

SONOMA, CA—Around every corner of Buena Vista Winery’s courtly, tree-shaded grounds, and inside its well-appointed and handsome stone buildings, visitors find the underpinnings of early California viticulture whispering a romantic narrative.  In 1857, Hungarian Count Agoston Haraszthy, a flamboyant vinicultural pioneer, established here the first premium winery in the state. He also built a massive stone winery with the nation’s first gravity-flow facilities and excavated California’s first wine caves.

The charming setting at Buena Vista Winery.

Fast-forward to harvest 2012—when Buena Vista Winery emerged from an extensive renovation of the original winery, caves, and grounds. Boisset Collection purchased Buena Vista in 2011. Jean-Charles Boisset, president of the family business, had visited Buena Vista on his first trip to California when he was eleven years old. The deep sense of history and the verdant setting made an indelible impression. Years later, after settling in Napa, he pounced on the opportunity to acquire the historic winery. Boisset, whose passion for California wines and pioneering spirit are often compared with Count Haraszthy’s, immediately launched plans to restore the estate to its former glory while adding twenty-first-century equipment for crafting premium wines. Prompted by his enduring love of history, and perhaps by providence, Boisset also poured a large fortune into the much needed structural retrofitting of the three-story stone Cellar Building (aka the Champagne Cellars) arguably the most important structure in American wine history. 

Blackwood remembers the day the Earth shook.

As Tom Blackwood, Buena Vista’s director of retail operations, explained “Vertical steel rebar was used to tie the walls into the beams and the floor.” In August 2014, the 6.0 Napa quake put the extensive restoration to the ultimate test. The structure survived beautifully. The building was renovated from the inside out with modern technology that, according to Blackwood, “let it move a little. It did what it was supposed to do, and it worked.” Without having the foresight to act when he did, the building would have sustained massive damage. A critical part of California History had been saved—and in the nick of time.