Italian Grapes Return to a Sierra Hill Called Chicago Park

It was a hot afternoon for late October in the Sierra, the kind that makes a person grateful for shade and a patio table, and harvest had been done at Montoliva Vineyard & Winery for a few weeks. On the slope below the house the Primitivo vines were turning the brilliant red they turn in the fall, and Mark Henry was in no hurry to get anywhere. There was no flight, just reasonably sized pours, and Mark would just say pull this one, let's have a glass of this, and another bottle came open. Between bottles he walked up to the house to check on his wife, Julianne, who was home recovering from knee replacement surgery, and then he came back down, sat, and picked up the story where he had left it.

One of the first bottles he opened was a 2023 Dolcetto. It poured a deep purple that the afternoon sun went straight through, and the first sip took me somewhere I didn't expect. The cherry came first, dark and a little sweet, the way cherry Coke tastes when it is ice cold, and then the black licorice underneath it, that faintly bitter edge Dolcetto carries on the finish. Put the two together and I was a kid in Maine again, on a hot summer afternoon with a rope of black licorice in one hand and the Red Sox game on the radio. It is a soft wine, low in acid and easy on the tannin, made to drink young and often, and it went down far too easily in the heat. Then I looked at the label. It says Chicago Park in large type across the front and sends the official appellation, Sierra Foothills, around to the back.

Chicago Park is not an appellation. It is an unincorporated farming hamlet at about 2,300 feet on the western slope of the Sierra, strung along Highway 174 between Colfax and Grass Valley, and most phones will route a driver to Grass Valley and leave the last few miles to faith. Mark puts the name of the hamlet on the front of his estate bottles because, in his view, the Sierra Foothills appellation has grown so big and so mixed that it stopped telling a buyer anything. He would rather the bottle say exactly where it came from, even if almost nobody has heard of the place, and he will move the name to the back when the government makes Chicago Park an appellation of its own. What the label is really making a case for is the hill, and the hill has a longer story than the winery does.

Mark told me the hill's history over the second or third bottle, and the local histories bear him out. The name was a sales pitch from the start. In 1887 developers from Colfax and Chicago bought several thousand acres around what had been Storms Station, a stop on the Nevada County Narrow Gauge Railroad, and sold them as the Chicago Park Colony, in tracts of twenty to forty acres with town lots laid out around a public square and streets named for the streets of Chicago. Nearly 7,000 acres went, mostly to buyers from Chicago, and many of them arrived to find the winters a good deal colder than the advertisements had suggested. Most of the town on the plat was never built. What did take was fruit. The colony tracts went into orchards, the area became known as the Bartlett Pear Belt, and in 1915 a Chicago Park grower's Bartletts were honored at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Among the early settlers were Italian-American families from Chicago who planted grapes alongside the pears, and grapes stayed part of the local farming through Prohibition before quietly disappearing. The railroad was gone by the end of the 1940s, pear blight late in the last century sent the orchard growers looking for other crops, and by the time Mark came through there was nobody left on the hill who remembered how to grow wine and no vineyard left to ask.

He told me how he came through, almost by accident, in 1999, after ten days of driving the Sierra Foothills with books and atlases in the car, looking for land. He had grown up on a small subsistence farm in Oregon, served in the Army, and run beer and winemaking supply stores around Seattle, where a bottle of Australian Shiraz at a steakhouse had turned him from beer to wine. He stopped at a diner in Chicago Park, and in 2000 he and Julianne had the land and the first vines. He enjoys this next part. The first consultant he hired looked at the site and told him not to plant, so he hired a second consultant to disagree with the first, and the second one told him the same thing. He planted anyway, close together at four feet by three in the old European way, and put in four of the Sangiovese clones that Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo had just brought to the United States, along with Aglianico, which made him the first grower in the northern Sierra Foothills to plant it. In 2002, with vines in the ground and no winery yet, he spent two weeks in Montalcino following Roberto Nannetti of the Crocedimezzo estate from the vineyard to the cellar, asking questions the whole way. He "made a pest of myself for a couple of weeks," as he later put it to the writer Paul Gregutt, and he came home with the long maceration he still uses. The first harvest came in 2005.

Montoliva sits on Mount Olive Road, and the winery's name is close to what the road would be called in Italian. The winery and the house are the same building. A visitor walks past fountains and an herb garden that guests are invited to pick from, and the vines start more or less where the lawn stops, with tall ponderosa pines standing around the edges and Adirondack chairs set out on the grass facing the rows. Nothing about it has been staged for a guest. The barrels sit in steel racks under a long overhang outside, stained red where the wine has run down the heads, with a pallet jack parked at the end of the row, and one of the tanks inside is named Don't Screw It Up. In 2015 Mark added a second vineyard on Wabash Avenue, a street that, like the hamlet, was named for Chicago, and between the two sites he farms about nine acres. He farms organically without paying for a certification he considers a racket, composts every skin and stem back into the rows, and calls himself a farmer before he calls himself a winemaker. "I don't make wine, I grow wine," he says, and he said some version of it to me more than once that afternoon. "It's hard work," he told Palate Press, "but I sleep well."

The elevation does a lot of the work. At 2,300 feet the days run warm and the nights run cool, and so far the hill has kept his growing seasons closer to normal than much of California has seen, though he is careful to say the climate has spared him most of its effects and not all of them. It also makes for a late harvest. Aglianico and Montepulciano ripen later than nearly anything else wherever they are grown, and most years Mark is still picking a month after the rest of Northern California has finished. This year he picked by hand three days running, the last of them just under 2,000 pounds of estate Negroamaro, and admitted afterward on the winery's Facebook page that he was gassed. He bought a couple of tons of Nero d'Avola from an El Dorado County grower that came in at almost 28 Brix, so dense it clogged the crusher-destemmer and then the old hand-crank machine too, so the fruit went into the fermenters whole, stems and all, and when the punchdown tool couldn't get through the cap, Mark climbed in with his boots on. He closed that post by admitting he had no idea yet what kind of wine he was making.

Growing grapes almost nobody else in California grows has cut both ways for him. Nobody could tell him how to farm southern Italian varieties in Nevada County, because nobody had done it, and he learned most of it by getting it wrong. He poured out his first several vintages of Falanghina before he learned to pick it early. "I've watered the vineyard with more wine than I like to admit," he told Palate Press. Sangiovese, the grape he came for, taught him the harder lesson. For years he kept waiting for the deep, earthy middle that Tuscan Sangiovese carries, on the theory that the vines were young, and it never came. He told me he finally accepted that he is not in Tuscany, and that Chicago Park gives him more fruit up front with the tannin and acid still standing behind it, and that is the wine he makes now. He put the bargain to Wine Bulletin as a question. "Who is going to tell me I'm doing it wrong?"

What he does make is a map of Italy drawn by somebody who refuses to skip the small towns, Sangiovese and Aglianico at the center of it, with Falanghina, Teroldego, Dolcetto, Negroamaro, Nero d'Avola, Montepulciano, Primitivo, Barbera and a little Canaiolo Nero around them, most of it in lots of 120 to 140 cases. The reds ferment slowly on Tuscan yeast strains, sit a long time on their skins, and rest about two years in French and Slovakian barrels, and after that, as he told Palate Press, he tries to "let it become whatever it is it wants to be."

He credits the Italians for that. The way he told it to me, a French grower treats the rule book as law, and if you break it the neighbors will burn your barn down, while an Italian treats the same rule book as a set of guidelines. Both countries forbid irrigating vines as a matter of routine, and on his last trip back to Montalcino he asked Nannetti whether the hotter summers had changed anything in the vineyard. Nannetti told him that it rains at night. The wines that come out of all this are earthy and dry and built for food.

The 2020 Sinistra, two-thirds Teroldego and one-third Barbera, was a nice wine and a lighter one. The Teroldego gives it dark fruit, but the Barbera brings the kind of acidity that keeps a wine moving, and on that hot patio it was a little more refreshing than the Dolcetto, the kind of red I could drink easily on an afternoon like that one, and the kind I would reach for on a weeknight without thinking twice. The 2022 Montepulciano, which I have taken to calling the full Monty, went the other direction. It was the most rustic wine on the table, deeper and more serious, with tannin that took hold and stayed, and it was aching for a Florentine steak, a thick bistecca seared over coals and sliced on a board. The grape comes from Abruzzo, on the other side of the Apennines from Tuscany, but before I had finished the glass it had me yearning for Florence anyway. The 2021 Primitivo came from the vines turning red below us. The fruit in it was right at its prime, a shade darker than the others, and with five years behind it the wine was starting to settle into itself, the edges rounding off and the fruit and the earth coming together into a very nice bottle. Primitivo and Zinfandel are close cousins, and like a good Zinfandel this one wanted a burger and fries at a summer cookout more than it wanted a white tablecloth.

None of them tasted like Cabernet in an Italian costume, which was the trouble with a lot of Italian grapes grown in California in the 1990s, and the winery's own website warns that anyone who doesn't care for earthy, tannic wine will probably not take to the Sangiovese or the Aglianico. It may be the most honest sentence on any winery website in the state.

The names on the labels carry the family history. Due Baci means two kisses, and it is the Sangiovese and Aglianico blend Mark made for his wedding to Julianne in 2008, which the guests liked enough that it never left the lineup. Sinistra means left, and it got the name because Mark is left-handed. Because almost nobody in California makes what he makes, he keeps score against the Italians instead, with a scorecard on his website called the Judgement of Chicago Park, a nod to the 1976 tasting in Paris, where he lines his bottles up against Italian wines at similar prices and publishes the results. He admits to a thumb on the scale, says he would never put his Sangiovese up against a great Brunello, and lets the Italian bottle win more than once.

None of the wine goes into distribution. A bottle of Montoliva comes from the hill or from the winery's website and from nowhere else, and the calendar on the hill runs on two fixed dates. The first is the estate Sangiovese pick in early October, which Mark opens to anyone willing to show up at first light and work. This year he capped the crew at fifty, had the RSVPs sent to his own email address so he would know how much champagne to buy, and wrote an invitation that offered volunteers a morning's chance to prove Karl Marx wrong about the work of their hands. When the fruit is in, there is a Harvest Dedication and a champagne brunch. The second date is the customer appreciation barbecue, catered by La Fornaretta, a Sicilian restaurant in the area, with Tony Bennett on the stereo.

Between those two dates come the weekends in the tasting room, where the person pouring is often one of his daughters. One of them is slated to take over sales and the winemaking so that Mark can spend more of his time in the rows, and the winery has said from the start that the vineyard would reach its full potential under his children and grandchildren. He has already decided that his children will be the ones to plant Barbera, the one grape he still buys. He has said he never expected fame or money from obscure grapes in a place called Chicago Park, and that what he wanted was to raise his children in a small community, run a farm that paid the mortgage, and wake up glad the day had started. He would like a few more wineries on the hill, he has said, because he could use the company, and that is what the label on the Dolcetto is waiting on too. An appellation takes more than one winery asking for it, and for now Montoliva is doing most of the asking.

I came home over the pass with a full case in the back of the car. Two of the Sinistras are still in the rack. I opened the third on a weeknight for friends, with nothing special for dinner, and before I poured it I told them it means left, because the man who grew it is left-handed. None of them had been to Chicago Park, and two of them asked where they could get a bottle. I had to tell them it was the hill or the website, which is the same answer Montoliva has been giving people for close to twenty years.

Sources: My visit and conversation with Mark Henry at Montoliva Vineyard & Winery, Chicago Park, October 24, 2026. montoliva.com, including the About Us, Our Vineyards, Our Philosophy and Judgement of Chicago Park pages, and the winery's 2026 harvest posts. Brianne Cohen, "An Italian Winery in California's Sierra Foothills," Palate Press, September 2023. Barbara Keck, "Wineries of the Sierra Foothills: Montoliva Vineyard & Winery," Tahoe Weekly, February 2022. Joe Campbell, Wine Bulletin, November 2022. Paul Gregutt, paulgwine.com. Dave McIntyre, The Washington Post, as quoted by the winery. Pat Jones, A Brief History of Chicago Park and Peardale (Nevada County Historical Society Bulletin, 1956) and The Chicago Park Connection (1983), via the Chicago Park, California entry on Wikipedia. Mark's full Meet the Winemakers entry is in the Meet the Winemakers series.