Marietta Cellars, Geyserville. Recorded on Zoom, October 28, 2026.
Before there was a winery, there was a table. By his family’s account, Chris Bilbro learned about simple, good cooking, hard work and honesty at his great-aunt Marietta’s, and in 1978, when he rented an old cow barn in Dry Creek Valley and started making wine in it, he named the place for her.
The first wine was a Zinfandel-led blend from old vines, bottled in 1980 without a vintage on the label and marked Lot 1. Marietta Cellars has made its Old Vine Red the same way ever since, one numbered lot after another. In 1990 Chris built a winery outside Geyserville, the family went on to buy its own vineyards and now farms more than three hundred acres, and his son Scot owns the winery today.
John Harley makes the wine there. When I wrote to him about this series in October, he answered that he was honored, but that he was only the winemaker and Marietta was the Bilbro family’s winery, and he asked whether I would rather interview Scot. I wrote back that being the winemaker was exactly why I’d asked. He has done that work for twenty-two harvests, from a big winery in Templeton to a custom crush in Sonoma County to the cellar in Geyserville.
We talked over Zoom on the morning of October 28. He had somewhere to be afterward, and we finished with time to spare. At the end he turned the questions around and asked where I lived and what my story was.
These are his answers to the twenty questions every winemaker in this series is asked.
1.Who taught you?
I went to school at Fresno State for winemaking, so all the teachers there taught me my basics. There was a winemaker on staff there, John Giannini, kind of old school, a little Italian guy, who taught me quite a bit, and one of my professors, Ken Fugelsang, taught me a lot of the technical side. As far as the real world goes, it depends on the subject. Probably my biggest influences were colleagues and friends, and also a winemaker named Bill Knuttel, who started at Saintsbury back in the day. I joined him in 2010. He was my employer, my boss. We didn’t end on a great note, but he taught me a lot about the industry, for sure.
2.Who have you taught? Where are they now?
Oh gosh, there have been a lot of interns. Miguel Salomon started as an intern with me back in 2012. He did a couple of harvests, and on our recommendation he went to Fresno State, got his degree, came back, and is now the winemaker at a custom crush called Elevation Custom Crush. Jamie Eggerss was an intern with me and went on to become the assistant winemaker and then associate winemaker at Chateau Montelena. And a bunch of others.
3.Which vintages do you date your life by?
There have been plenty. I remember my first vintage, 2005, at Wild Horse Winery down in Templeton. That was a crazy heavy harvest. It was a big winery with a lot to learn, eighty- to eighty-five-hour weeks, which was absolutely insane. 2011 taught me a lot. I was up here in Sonoma County by then. It was a cold, wet, rainy harvest, and the wines took a long time in bottle to come around, but in my opinion it was one of the better harvests of the decade. And obviously 2017 and 2019. Those were riddled with fires and smoke and all that. Those definitely stand out.
4.What has changed in the trade since you started that a new hire would walk right past?
This is a weird one, but I think it’s the overall mindset of what it takes to sacrifice time and effort to make wine. To summarize it, it’s work ethic. You get up early before everybody, and you stay until the job’s done, and sometimes that means you miss weddings, you miss days off, you miss meals, you miss breaks. Someone my age would notice that, but someone new and younger might not.
5.Walk me through a day at the peak of harvest, hour by hour.
Obviously, every harvest is different, and every place is different. At Marietta, where I am now, I’ll get up around five and get out the door around 5:30. We tend to grow and harvest all of our own grapes, so on my way to work I’m calling my vineyard manager and vineyard crew to check in, see how the night picks went, and get updates on everything. I get to the winery before the crew, open up all the doors, turn on the lights, vent the facility, and prepare everything for the incoming fruit. I check on ferments if we have any going, which basically means smelling all the tanks, and then I get the crew going.
Once the crew’s going, I head out to the vineyards to check on what’s coming in the next day and the following week. After sampling and tasting, I come back to the winery, see how the workload is progressing, and check in with the crew. Then I stay until the end of the day, which depends on the day, usually six, seven, sometimes eight at night, and head home. In between, I eat when I can, usually at my desk or over a crusher or a tank. That’s a normal day.
6.What decision do you make that you cannot fully explain to somebody else?
There are two things. First, when you smell a tank, a ferment, you can tell when it’s going to need something just by the way it smells. I’ve tried to describe it as a heaviness to the aroma or a lightness to it, and those mean different things. That comes with experience, but to someone outside the industry it would seem crazy.
Second, when a red ferment is finished and still sitting on skins, you taste the juice and you can tell whether it needs more time or not, based on tannin extraction and flavor profile. Someone outside the industry probably wouldn’t even taste the slop that’s coming out, but with experience you taste through all of that and see the forest through the trees. That’s really difficult to explain to somebody who’s not in the industry.
7.Tell me about a harvest that went wrong. Start at the beginning.
We’ve had a lot of them in the last decade: fire years, evacuations, a pandemic. Those are the big-button items. But one in particular was 2012. I had just opened a custom crush called Brack Mountain Custom Crush with a friend of mine, Dan Fitzgerald. He and I were running the facility, and it was nowhere near ready. We were still plumbing the tanks and didn’t have our press yet, and 2012 was a huge harvest for Sonoma County. The grapes just kept coming in and coming in, and on top of that we had a workforce that was a little inexperienced, so we were literally filling every container we could. At some point in the harvest a forklift clipped a tank door, the door opened, and the whole tank caved in like a beer can. I was probably twenty-seven at the time, running that facility, and to me that was the worst-case scenario.
8.Who is the legend around here? Somebody people tell stories about.
I’ve met a lot of them. Bob Cabral, Greg La Follette. Greg was always fun. He actually worked right behind Brack Mountain at Owl Ridge, and he would come over and play his bagpipes. Growing up in the industry and hearing about these names, there have been a lot of people I’d consider legends.
Back in 2012, when we opened that facility, we were working late. It was dark outside and the lights were on inside, so we couldn’t see out, and this person walked up with a big slice of pizza in his hand. He came in and said, “Hey, you guys are new here.” It was a small community of garagistes, custom crushes basically. I’d never met him. It must have been 8:30 at night. We started talking, and he said, “Welcome to the neighborhood,” and that was it. He walked back around the corner and left. I said, “Who the hell was that?” and Dan, the other winemaker there, said, “That’s Greg La Follette.” We were kind of awestruck. Oh my God, we’d heard so much about him, and he was just eating a slice of pizza.
9.Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year? Same thing, same way.
We usually have a harvest party. And since I leave my wife as a harvest widow, we tend to take a big trip together as a family, a weekend getaway where we just spend some time together.
There’s also this weird funk I get into right after harvest. You’re idling at such a high rate, you miss this big chunk of your life, and then you have to get back into the real world and catch up on everything you’ve missed. There’s always that malaise after harvest. And I always get sick. I don’t get sick during harvest, but I always get sick after it. The good tradition is the trip with my family.
10.What do people outside the trade always get wrong about this work?
We don’t add blueberries to the wine. We don’t add fruit. We don’t add plums. A lot of people outside the industry ask how we got the blueberry into the wine. They also don’t really comprehend how much time it takes during harvest to do what we do. When I first married my wife, around 2012 or 2013, she said nobody works this much. She was convinced I had a girlfriend on the side. I said, no, I swear, I’m just at work. Look at my hands. They’re purple.
“Look at my hands. They’re purple.”
11.What’s the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?
This was 2005, one of my first harvests, at Wild Horse. I was about to do a pump-over on a Zinfandel tank, and I hooked up to the wrong tank. I was about to pump it over into a Chardonnay tank and make ten thousand gallons of rosé. As I was about to open the valve, the assistant winemaker, Jason Whitmire, caught me. He was very, very nice about it. He walked up and explained what was going on, and he explained that it’s okay to make mistakes, but double-check everything before you do anything. That’s still something I live by today. There’s nothing wrong with double-checking. Don’t just look at the work order blindly and do what it says. Use your head.
12.Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?
Yeast inoculations. I was taught by the microbiology professor at Fresno State, Rob Thornton, how to correctly rehydrate yeast. If you read the packet, you’d use a big whisk and stir it up in the water and all that. He said absolutely not, and he grabbed the whisk and threw it out of the winery. I’ll never forget it. He said, “Do not do that. You’re killing half the yeast. There’s a reason these yeast companies tell you to use two pounds per thousand gallons.” To this day I use his method. It’s time-consuming, with lots of aeration, but I’ve always had really good luck with it, and I’ve taught a lot of people the same way.
13.What were you taught that you’ve since stopped doing?
Being afraid of reduction in wine, I guess. Reacting to it and not having patience. If a wine starts to go reductive, obviously you need to act, but sometimes you need to be patient and know it’s going through its life cycle of aging.
By the same token, so-called stuck fermentations. Inevitably, around October or November, the yeast go to sleep. If you have a ferment that’s sluggish, put it in barrel, make sure it’s topped, and don’t try to restart it until spring, because the yeast will usually wake back up and start fermenting on their own. We were taught it had to go dry before it went to barrel. That’s one thing I’ve stopped doing.
14.Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?
Besides numbers? Where I am now, no. One of the wineries where I do custom crush has four tanks named after the Beatles: John, Paul, George, and Ringo. At the other wineries, no, just simple names. The press, the crusher.
15.Somebody walks in knowing nothing about wine. What do they already know that you can build on?
Coffee or tea. If someone’s inexperienced with wine and I’m trying to figure out what to pour them, my first question is usually, are you a tea drinker or a coffee drinker? That tells me what direction to take them. If they’re a coffee drinker, I ask how they take their coffee. If they’re a tea drinker, I ask what kind of tea they like. That usually leads to whether they like a sweeter, heavier, bigger style or something more earthy and herbal.
It really works. If someone says they like their coffee dark and black, okay, you’re going to love this Petite Sirah. If they like green tea, I’m pretty sure they’ll like my light Pinot or maybe a white. If they take their coffee with sugar and cream and all the accoutrements, then here’s my semi-sweet Zin.
16.Whoever pours this wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn’t in the tasting notes?
To me, tasting notes usually talk about the wine itself and what you’re going to experience smelling and tasting. What I always start with is where the wine came from, how it was made, where the vineyard is, the vineyard’s attributes, a little history on the clone and the variety. So while they’re working out their own aromas and textures and flavors, I can tell the story of the vineyard and the variety and how it was made. That’s usually too much information for a tasting note, so I like to personalize it as they’re tasting and paint the picture of the story of the wine.
Some of the best wines I’ve ever had have probably been the least expensive, least exciting wines, but I was in a great location with friends and family around a good meal, and they’re memorable. How do you make a wine memorable? You have to tell the story of the wine, because tasting rooms can be sterile. You’re holding a glass under bright lights, and it almost feels like you’re being tested. I want to let the guard down and say, hey, this is supposed to be an enjoyable beverage. Sit down. Welcome to my kitchen table. That’s how I grew up. Wine was always on the table, whether it was good, bad, or ugly.
17.What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?
Probably dig out a tank. Doing a punch-down, a pump-over, digging out the tank, those are really important steps to understand what the wine is. You get a ground-level, face-to-face aroma experience when you’re doing a pump-over or a punch-down or shoveling the pomace out of the tank. It also gets you excited, because with every shovelful you get this waft of the building blocks of aroma. You get a splash of it in your mouth, your hands are stained the color, and you think, oh, this is going to be a really good Cab, or this is going to be an excellent Pinot. Or even Sauvignon Blanc. That’s the one variety where I feel you can taste it in the vineyard and it comes out exactly the way it tasted there. It’s pretty interesting.
18.What’s your favorite wine that you don’t make?
Oh my gosh. I love Barolo, but you know what, I’m going to change that. Champagne. Bubbles are totally different, in my opinion. There are sparkling winemakers, and then there’s every other winemaker. Sparkling winemakers are a different breed. Talk about being gutsy, having faith, and working at the extremes. The patience they have to have is pretty remarkable. I love Bollinger. Champagne, by far.
19.When you make a great one, do you know right away?
I tend to know right away on most things. The exception was the 2011 harvest, which I wrote off completely during harvest. A couple of years in bottle, I was blown away by how good those wines turned out to be at low alcohols. It was a modern-day throwback to old-school winemaking in California. Most of the alcohols were in the low thirteens and high twelves on Cabernet and Pinot, and with time they turned out delicate and mind-blowing, structurally sound and full of flavor.
It’s a sleeper vintage, in my opinion. It was a winemaker’s vintage. You had to be careful with it. A lot of people added sugar or alcohol after fermentation to correct toward the so-called normal numbers. If you had faith and trust and patience, it rewarded you for sure.
20.One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?
Does it have to be a wine I’ve made? I really love Pelaverga, from Piedmont. It’s so peppery and so deceiving. It’s light, but it has texture and softness, and it’s a wine you could just smell and be happy with. You don’t even have to drink it. It smells like white pepper and black pepper, all the good things I love in the aromatics of a red wine. Then you drink it, and it’s just lively on the palate. If I had one pour to get somebody into wine, that would probably be it.
One more: What does this work take away from you that people don’t see?
Fall. Twenty-two years of probably the best season around. Most people enjoy the cooler weather and the rain that comes with fall. And every winemaker and viticulturist is a hundred times better than any meteorologist at predicting the weather at harvest time. I’ve missed weddings, celebrations, funerals, a whole host of things because of harvest, and that’s something people just don’t really understand.
Recorded on Zoom on October 28, 2026, and edited lightly for length and clarity. John reviewed the piece before publication. Background on Marietta Cellars is drawn from Wine Spectator, Shanken News Daily, and The Underground Wine Letter, and on Bill Knuttel from the William Knuttel winery.
Patrick R. Dunn trained in narrative at the University of Maine under Stephen King and folklorist Edward "Sandy" Ives, and spent thirty years leading global crisis management and operational resilience teams across four continents, through 9/11, Katrina, and Sandy. He spent more than a decade as a National Park Service interpretive ranger and is WSET Level 3 certified. Through his practice, Vianarra, he works with winery owners, boutique hotels, and restaurants on how they tell their story. He writes about wine and hospitality every week at newsletter.vianarra.com.