Meet the Winemakers: Mark Henry

Mark Henry tells the rain story the way a man tells a joke he has been saving, which is to say he takes his time getting there. We were sitting at his winery on a Saturday afternoon late in October, the vines on the slope below the house going yellow at the edges, and he was telling me about his most recent trip back to Montalcino to see the man who taught him to make wine. Tuscan summers have been running hotter and drier, and Mark had wanted to know whether his old teacher had changed anything in the vineyard because of it. He expected to hear about the leaf canopy, or about picking a week earlier. Underneath the question sat the one thing a grower in a drought would most like to do and is not supposed to, which is water the vines. The Italian looked at him and said that it rains at night.

Mark explained the joke for me, and the explanation is the part that stays with me. The way he tells it, a French grower treats the rule book as law, and if you break it the neighbors will burn your barn down. An Italian grower treats the same rule book as a set of guidelines written by reasonable people who would surely understand. The rules themselves bear him out. France banned irrigation of its appellation vineyards by decree in 1964 and has allowed emergency exceptions only since 2006, with a hard stop in the middle of August. Montalcino farmed dry until a ministry ruling in 2013 let growers water in an emergency. Mark repeats the line about the night rain with obvious affection, as though it explains a good deal about how he ended up making wine from Italian grapes on a hill in California.

Chicago Park is easy to miss. The road in runs past a general store and not much else, most phones route a driver to Grass Valley and leave the last few miles to faith, and the town's claim on the map is a scatter of old orchards at 2,300 feet on the western slope of the Sierra. Montoliva sits on Mount Olive Road, and the winery's name is close to what the road would be called in Italian. The house and the winery are the same building. Visitors walk past fountains and an herb garden they are invited to pick from, and the vines start more or less where the lawn stops. Mark and his wife, Julianne, have farmed here since 2000, and for nearly all of that time Mark has been the only person in town making wine from Italian grapes.

1. Who taught you? Say the name.

Roberto Nannetti, though he came last. Mark grew up on a small subsistence farm in Oregon, where the family grew what it ate, and he knew neither wine nor beer as a boy. The Army stationed him in Germany and took care of the beer. He came out a service-disabled veteran, earned a political science degree, and in 1991 opened a small chain of beer and winemaking supply stores around Seattle, where home winemakers brought him questions he had to be able to answer. That counter taught him how wine is made. In 1999 Ben Zeitman at Amador Foothill Winery let him taste Aglianico straight from a barrel, and that barrel is why there is Aglianico in Chicago Park. In 2002, with vines in the ground and no winery yet, Mark went to Montalcino and rented the converted barn at La Crociona, the agriturismo on the Nannetti family's Crocedimezzo estate, a short walk from Biondi-Santi. He paid for the room like any other guest, volunteered his time, and spent the stay shadowing Nannetti from the vines to the cellar, asking questions the whole way. Nannetti taught him extended maceration, and Mark later told the writer Paul Gregutt that he "made a pest of myself for a couple of weeks." He has gone back since, and the rain-at-night answer came from the most recent visit. One more teacher goes unnamed, a veteran winemaker who told him before he opened to stay small, never make more than 200 cases of any one wine, and only make wines he liked to drink himself, in case he turned out to be the only one drinking them.

2. Who have you taught? Where are they now?

His daughters, and they are still on the hill. They pour in the tasting room, and one of them is slated to take over sales and the winemaking so Mark can spend more of his time in the vineyard. He has decided his children will be the ones to plant Barbera, the one grape he still buys. The winery has said from the start that the vineyard will reach its full potential under his children and grandchildren. Outside the family, he has guest-lectured on entrepreneurship at Sierra College.

3. Which vintages do you date your life by?

1992, the Rosemont Estate Balmoral Shiraz at a Seattle steakhouse that moved him from beer to wine and put the idea of a vineyard in his head. 1999, ten days driving the Sierra Foothills with books and atlases in the car, and a chance stop at a diner in Chicago Park. 2000, the land and the first vines. 2002, Montalcino. 2005, the first harvest, and 2007, the first wines released. 2008, his wedding to Julianne, for which he made Due Baci, a Sangiovese and Aglianico blend the guests liked enough that it never left the lineup. 2015, a second vineyard on Wabash Avenue. 2021, the first Falanghina he gave skin contact.

4. What has changed in the trade since you started that somebody your age would notice and a new hire would walk right past?

The Cal-Ital wave came and went while his vines were still young. His reading is that producers in the late 1990s farmed Sangiovese and Aglianico ripe, extracted them hard, put them in new oak, and sterile-filtered them the way they did Cabernet, and ended up with expensive wine that tasted like thin Cabernet. Falanghina, which he now grows, was barely known in Italy thirty years ago and is now the most planted white grape in the south. And the Sierra Foothills appellation, in his view, grew so big and so mixed that it stopped telling a buyer anything, which is why his labels say Chicago Park in large type and send Sierra Foothills to the back. Climate is the newest change, and his elevation has mostly spared him so far. At 2,300 feet his growing seasons still run close to what he would call normal, though he is careful to say most of the effects, and not all of them.

5. Walk me through a day at the peak of harvest, hour by hour.

It starts at first light. On the day the estate Sangiovese comes in, the crew gathers at seven in the morning and takes three or four hours to pick the three or four tons, every cluster by hand, and then there is brunch. Most harvest days end without the champagne. This year he picked by hand three days running, the last of them just under 2,000 pounds of estate Negroamaro, and admitted on the winery's Facebook page that he was gassed. After all these years, he wrote, he is still amazed by the people who do that work every day of the season and get too little credit for it. The fruit comes in by the bin. Two heaping bins of Falanghina from the Wabash Avenue Vineyard come to about a ton. The Dolcetto from the same site came to 4,500 pounds. Teroldego he calls self-harvesting, since the fruit practically drops into the bins, which is how he described 5,000 pounds of it before conceding the crew had a hand in it. His harvest also runs late. Aglianico and Montepulciano ripen later than nearly anything else wherever they are grown, and at 2,300 feet most years he is still picking a month after the rest of Northern California has wrapped up. This year the estate Montepulciano came in last, on a Friday, and with it the farming side of the year closed. A few weeks of fermentation and maceration, and then into barrel.

6. What decision do you make here that you cannot fully explain to somebody else?

Letting the wine go where it wants. He has told other writers that the cellar scares him, that much of the chemistry is beyond him, and that if a tank went wrong he would not know how to fix it. So he does everything he can in the vineyard, ferments the reds slowly on Tuscan yeast strains, leaves them a long time on their skins, rests them about two years in 225-liter French and Slovakian barrels, three for the reserves, and then lets the wine choose its own path. He credits the Italians with teaching him to allow it. The way he tells it, a French grower treats the rule book as law, and an Italian treats it as a set of guidelines.

7. Tell me about a harvest that went wrong. Start at the beginning.

The beginning is that nobody could tell him how to grow southern Italian grapes in Nevada County, because nobody had done it. Aglianico takes powdery mildew at the first suggestion of humidity, and he pulled out a good share of his original planting before he understood how particular the grape is about where it lives. He poured out his first several vintages of Falanghina before he learned to pick it early, between 20.5 and 21.5 Brix. "I've watered the vineyard with more wine than I like to admit," he told Palate Press. He put the trade-off to Wine Bulletin as a single question. Growing grapes nobody else grows means nobody can correct him, and nobody can help him either. "Who is going to tell me I'm doing it wrong?"

8. Who is the legend around here? Somebody people tell stories about.

The town itself. Chicago Park was settled in the mid-1880s by Italian-Americans out of Chicago who planted orchards and vineyards to make the place feel like home, and grapes were part of the local farming through Prohibition. None of those vineyards survived, and Mark planted on a hill that had grown wine grapes once and had nobody left who remembered how. Then there are the two consultants. The first told him not to plant grapes on that site. He hired a second one to disagree, who told him the same thing. He planted anyway, at four feet by three in the old European way, and put in four Sangiovese clones that Vivai Cooperativi Rauscedo had just brought to the United States. The winery now claims more clonal diversity in Sangiovese than any other vineyard in California.

9. Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year? Same thing, same way.

The estate Sangiovese pick. Every year he opens it to anyone willing to come out and work, starting at first light, and when the fruit is in there is a Harvest Dedication and a champagne brunch. This year's pick was Sunday, October 4, with the crew capped at fifty and RSVPs going to his own email address so he could be sure of having enough champagne. His invitation leaned on Karl Marx, who argued that industrial work cuts the worker off from what he makes. At Montoliva, Mark wrote, they are elbow, knee, and neck deep in the grapes, and he offered anyone who came a morning's chance to prove Marx wrong. The other fixed date on the calendar is the customer appreciation barbecue, catered by La Fornaretta, a local Sicilian restaurant, with Tony Bennett on the stereo.

10. What do people outside the trade always get wrong about this work?

That a winemaker makes wine. "I don't make wine, I grow wine," he writes on the winery's website, and he said some version of it to me more than once. He calls himself a farmer first. He is in the rows every day, uses no pesticides and as little weed control as he can manage, composts every skin and stem back into the vineyard, and farms organically without paying for a certification he calls a racket. He would take biodynamic certification if he had enough land to carry the livestock it requires. Palate Press reported his conviction that the best fertilizer a vineyard gets is the owner's boot prints. His idea of terroir, worked out in his brewing days, takes in the dirt and the weather along with how he farms, how he handles the cellar, and even the size of his barrels, and his word for what it puts in the glass is somewhere-ness. He holds the newer theories to the same standard. Growers in El Dorado County have lately been talking up Sierra Spice, the idea that the pines around foothill vineyards give the wines a flavor of their own. Mark's vineyard has pines all around it, and he says he is mildly skeptical but willing to be convinced.

11. What's the first thing you got wrong, and who caught it?

Sangiovese, the grape he came for. He planted it to make wine the way they do in Montalcino, and through the first several crops he kept waiting for the deep, earthy middle that Tuscan Sangiovese carries, on the theory that young vines needed time. It never arrived. Nobody caught it for him. He worked it out by tasting his own wines year after year and accepting, as he has said since, that he is not in Tuscany. Chicago Park gives him more fruit at the front of the wine than an Italian bottle shows, with the tannin and the acid still standing behind it, and that is the wine he makes.

12. Is there something you still do the way you were taught, even though you know a faster way exists?

Most of it. The close vine spacing, the long maceration Nannetti taught him, the slow fermentations, the two years and more in barrel, and the vineyard work done by hand. The point of going to Montalcino was to learn the slow way.

13. What were you taught that you've since stopped doing?

Picking white grapes the California way. His early Falanghina was picked ripe and went down the drain until he brought the sugars down. More broadly, he stopped doing anything that would hide the earth, tannin, or acid in a grape that has them. His own website warns that anyone who doesn't care for complex, earthy, noticeably tannic wine will probably not take to his Sangiovese or Aglianico.

14. Is there a tank or a piece of equipment around here that has a name?

Yes. One of the tanks is named Don't Screw It Up.

15. Somebody walks in knowing nothing about wine. What do they already know that you can build on?

Chardonnay. Falanghina was the first white he fell for after working with Pinot Grigio and a few others, and in 2010 he became the first vintner in California to work with it. He has described it as Chardonnay that doesn't need oak to keep it from being dull, which gives a newcomer something familiar to hold onto before the earthier reds. From there he starts them on the reds with his own preference for the drier, earthier wines of central and southern Italy, and the fair warning that anyone who doesn't care for earth and tannin will probably not take to his Sangiovese or Aglianico.

16. Whoever pours this wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn't in the tasting notes?

That the label says Chicago Park on purpose, and Sierra Foothills goes on the back until the government makes Chicago Park an AVA of its own. That Sinistra, two-thirds Teroldego and one-third Barbera, means left, because Mark is left-handed. That Due Baci is a wedding wine. That the wines are earthy and dry and built for a plate of food, which he once summed up for the Santa Barbara Independent as "earthy, dry, rustic." That none of it goes into distribution, so the bottle came from the hill or the website and nowhere else. And that the man who grew it is a service-disabled Army veteran, which is why the winery gives every year to the Disabled American Veterans, alongside the Chicago Park School where his children went.

17. What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine? Something the glass doesn't give them.

The farming. Watch him in the rows, where he is every day, or watch him propagate Canaiolo Nero, the old Tuscan blending grape so scarce in California that no nursery stocks it. He roots about a hundred vines a year himself and has been waiting on them to mature enough for a wine of their own. For years, he writes, he woke up resolved to call the nursery about Barbera and went to bed knowing he didn't have time for the nine acres he already had. Or watch him in a fermenter in his boots. This year he bought a couple of tons of Nero d'Avola from an El Dorado County grower, and by the time it was picked it had climbed to almost 28 Brix, so dense it clogged the crusher-destemmer and then the old hand-crank machine too. The fruit went into the fermenters whole, stems and all, the way some high-end Pinot Noir is made, and when the punchdown tool couldn't get through the cap, on went the boots. He explained all of it in a post that opened by warning that he never uses a few words when many will do, and closed by admitting he had no idea yet what kind of wine he was making.

18. What's your favorite wine that you don't make? Describe it without using tasting notes.

Brunello di Montalcino. He went to the source to learn how it is made, and he has given up trying to equal it. He still keeps score. Because almost nobody in California makes what he makes, he tastes his bottles against Italian wines at similar prices and posts the results on his website as the Judgement of Chicago Park, a nod to the 1976 tasting in Paris. He admits to a thumb on the scale and says he would never put his Sangiovese up against a great Brunello. His loyalty to the real thing makes him a hard man to fool. After this year's harvest he opened a 2021 Chianti Classico that Decanter had recommended and that claimed to be all Sangiovese, and found it nearly opaque, far darker than Sangiovese has any business being. He remembered Brunellogate, the 2008 scandal in which several big Montalcino names were caught blending in grapes the rules didn't allow. The producer's explanation was a proprietary way of farming that makes darker Sangiovese, which, he noted, is what a lot of Brunello houses were saying in 2007.

19. When you make a great one, do you know right away? What comes to mind when it happens, a place or something you remember?

The record suggests he is the last to be sure. When Paul Gregutt tasted a first round of Montoliva samples knowing nothing about the winery, he asked for the whole portfolio and wrote that the second round was better than the first. Mark's habit with a good wine is to line it up against an Italian bottle and publish the notes, and more than once the Italian bottle wins.

20. One pour, one stranger. Which wine, and what do you say before they taste it?

Aglianico, by the weight of everything he has said about it. It is the grape that brought him to Chicago Park, after one taste from Ben Zeitman's barrel in 1999, and it is the one that nearly broke him, taking powdery mildew at the first hint of humidity. He has called it one of his mainstays, and he told Wine Bulletin that he likes wines with a strong tannic backbone and that Aglianico grown right has that in abundance. What he would say before the stranger tastes it is the same thing he has told every writer who asked: this is an earthy, tannic wine from southern Italy, and if that isn't your kind of wine, it won't be your kind of wine here either.

He has said he never expected fame or money from obscure grapes in a place called Chicago Park. What he wanted was to raise his children in a small community, run a farm that paid the mortgage, and wake up most mornings glad the day had started. He would like a few more wineries on the hill, he has said, because he could use the company. When I drove back out past the general store the sky over the foothills was clear, and I caught myself hoping, on his behalf, that it would rain tonight.

Sources. Conversation with Mark Henry at Montoliva Vineyard & Winery, Chicago Park, October 24, 2026. montoliva.com, About Us, Our Vineyards, Our Philosophy, and Judgement of Chicago Park pages. Montoliva Vineyard & Winery Facebook posts, 2026 harvest. Paul Gregutt, "Can American Wineries Do Justice to Italian Varieties?" paulgwine.com, reposted at montoliva.com. "Saluting Italian Varieties at Montoliva Vineyards & Winery," The Wine Write, November 2022. Joe Campbell, "Montoliva: Family Style Italian Wines in the Heart of the North Sierra Foothills," Wine Bulletin, November 2022. Brianne Cohen, "An Italian Winery in California's Sierra Foothills," Palate Press, September 2023. Fredric Koeppel, "Montoliva Vineyard & Winery: Italian Varieties from Chicago Park," Bigger Than Your Head, November 2022. Barbara Keck, "Wineries of the Sierra Foothills: Montoliva Vineyard & Winery," Tahoe Weekly, February 2022. Matt Kettmann, "Sipping Sierra Foothills," Santa Barbara Independent, September 2011. Life Between the Vines podcast, episode 512. Tenuta Crocedimezzo and La Crociona, Montalcino, estate descriptions. On irrigation rules: Jancis Robinson, "Water, water, not quite everywhere," jancisrobinson.com; Do Bianchi, "Italian government allows emergency irrigation," May 2013.