Meet the Winemakers: Matt Parish

Matt Parish Wines and Vinture Consulting, California. Recorded November 4, 2026, just after harvest.

This harvest, Matt Parish programmed a set of AI bots to do the arithmetic of crush, the yeast and acid additions a winemaker works out day after day until the last tank is pressed. He told me they were amazing at it. Then he checked every number by hand, because anything added to a wine stays in it, and he isn’t ready to hand that to a machine yet.

His days started in a vineyard at sunup and ended about five hundred miles later, with the front seat of his car serving as his office. In between were as many as half a dozen wineries, where he tasted every ferment and wrote the work orders that told each cellar what to do next.

Before any of that, he ran group winemaking for Constellation through the years the company was doing billion-dollar deals, and then served as chief winemaker for the Americas at Treasury Wine Estates. In 2012 he put his own name on a bottle. Now he divides his time between that label and Vinture, his consulting business, which is why so many of the cellars on his route belong to other people.

He came up in New Zealand and still sounds like it, and he learned the trade the way his generation did, flying between hemispheres to work other people’s harvests. When I asked him what keeps him in this work, he went straight back to a room in Central Victoria in 1995, the day before his first harvest in a winery, when a winemaker opened a bottle of Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millénaires and the whole room came alive.

These are his answers to the twenty questions every winemaker in this series is asked, along with the bonus question I’ve added since and five follow-ups he answered in writing.

1. Who taught you?

There are lots of people that taught me, but two of the most influential were David Wollan and Gary Baldwin, and that was very early in my career. After graduating from university in New Zealand, I spent a number of years as a flying winemaker doing harvests around the planet, and I ended up back in Australia and did some work for them on a project. They brought me into their consulting business, Wine Network Consulting. Australia and New Zealand were going off at that time (late ’90s), and there was lots of activity in the wine industry. Their business was built around technical winemaking and viticulture advice, but it also extended into vineyard and winery design, wine technology and wine business, and a lot of other innovative things.

The reason they were influential, and I think it set me up for success later on, is that they both shared a passion for wine and fired that passion in me, but they were quite different personalities with quite different outlooks on the wine business and winemaking. Gary had come out of the Australian Wine Research Institute and worked as a winemaker, so he had a very technical and scientific approach, and he always asked a good question: “Why are you doing that? Back it up with some science.” That always made me think about why I did things. He always went along the principle of keeping it simple. How do you make this simple? And he was a people person who really loved wine, so he was a great mentor.

David loved wine too, and he was technical and very scientific as well, but he was much more interested in the technology and business around wine and how they related. So I had Gary growing the pure technical winemaking side, and David helping me develop my thinking around wine business and the greater side of it. For me the science was important, the art was important, and then the business became important, and understanding all three of those components set me up for success throughout my career. Years later, Jose Fernandez, who ran Constellation Wines, told me my unique strength was balancing the art, science and business of wine. I think a lot of that goes straight back to Gary and David. They were formative, and to this day I keep in touch with them and value their input.

2. Who have you taught, and where are they now?

I thought this was an interesting question, because I feel like I’ve learned even from people who are relatively new to the business, and through my career I’ve worked with lots of talented winemakers. Honestly, I don’t feel like it’s my place to name a particular person. That might sound strange, but I think that’s their place. Hopefully some of my knowledge and expertise has rubbed off, and I’m sure I’ve helped some formative winemakers. It’s not that I don’t feel comfortable. I just don’t feel right saying it.

3. Is there a vintage you date your life by?

1995 was the first vintage I did in a winery. I’d done some vintages working in the vineyard before, but that was my first in the winery, at Blue Pyrenees Estate in Central Victoria, Australia. 2008 was my first vintage as chief winemaker at Treasury Wine Estates, so you’re in the big role. That was a challenging vintage. It was pretty wet. I remember sitting up in Knights Valley machine harvesting, and the fruit was falling on the ground in front of the harvester. That was an interesting anomaly.

2012 was the vintage from which I launched the Matt Parish wines, my own brand, so that was a big one. And then 2017 was the fire year. I’m sure most winemakers in California remember that one pretty vividly. Those are the pivotal vintages.

4. What’s changed in the trade since you started that someone new would walk right past?

Maybe it’s just the roles I’ve had, but the most important thing is the seasonality. I used to love the seasonality. You’d be in the vineyard pruning, and you’d get sick of that. You’d move into the growing season, and you’d get sick of that. You’d do some bottling and get sick of that, and then it was harvest time, and you’d kind of get sick of that. Saying I was sick of it is maybe not the right term, but the repetition got a bit too much and a bit boring, and just when that moment happened, you’d get to the next thing. I loved that flow. Now I feel like everything’s happening all the time. You can do multiple vintages, of course, but you always feel like you’re harvesting and bottling, or you’re marketing and making. It just never stops. It just keeps on going.

5. Walk me through a typical harvest day at the peak.

As a winemaker, I’m working on lots of different projects. I’ve got my own brand, I’ve got consulting clients, and I do some business-related work for Azur Associates, which is M&A and things like that, so I’ve always been juggling a lot of different things.

On a typical day I want to get out to the vineyards at sunup. That’s the best time of day to see the vineyards. I do a couple of hours out there, normally focused on one or two AVAs. Then I shoot back to the winery, taste off everything for the day, and get work orders going or check in on them. In the afternoon it’s really about planning for the next day or the next week, the harvest schedule and all the rest of it, and getting the work orders out. I try to get some time to get home for dinner. I’ve probably done 500 miles in the car by then. The front seat of my car is my office, and I’m normally working across multiple wineries, so when I say I’m checking on a winery, I’m probably going to two, three, or more, maybe up to half a dozen in a day. Then I have a bit of dinner, catch up on emails and tick some things off, and it’s bedtime, and it’s back at it again.

6. What decision do you make that you can’t fully explain to someone else?

A lot of the science can be explained. In the business there’s obviously instinct, but I think it’s really around the art. Take blending, for example. You’ve got 10, 15, 20 components in front of you, and you’re blending up a wine. You can certainly describe each of those components, and you’ve got a view as to how they could interact or intersect in that blend. But it’s the combination of all of those that is more difficult to explain to a layperson.

7. Tell me about a harvest that went wrong.

2017 was a monumental harvest. Did it go wrong? Did it go right? That’s probably an equally good question. The fires hit right at the peak of harvest. We had fruit sitting out there, and we had wineries where fruit was in the middle of ferment, and we couldn’t access the vineyards or the wineries. The wine was in effect making itself. I was working out of a couple of wineries in Sonoma around Kenwood, and it took us days to get permission to go in. We finally got permission for a skeleton crew, and we were basically doing whatever we could just to get through and make sure at least the basic stuff was getting done, like yeast being added.

In a perfect world I’d love to have that harvest again without all of those challenges. But at the end of the day, funnily enough, maybe winemakers aren’t as important as they think they are. The wines actually turned out okay. There were some that didn’t, but for the most part it was a good outcome. It was challenging, and it was emotional too, because you were driving through fires, and homes had been ravaged. It was a very interesting time.

8. Who’s the legend, someone people tell stories about?

There are a bunch of big characters in the wine industry, and he would probably hate me calling him a legend. In my early years in California I worked for Constellation, and they promoted me to director of group winemaking. Constellation was growing significantly. I think we were doing billion-dollar deals for several of those years. The scale was just crazy. I think we were processing something like 650,000 tons, and New Zealand, where I come from, back then was about 300,000 tons in total.

I was working with Ken Shyvers, who came through the Robert Mondavi school as a winemaker and was in the role of chief winemaker. He and I were pretty much joined at the hip. We traveled to one of the twenty-something wineries we were working out of every day, really trying to put together a cohesive collective plan. He was this laconic, Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Californian, and he always had a great sense of humor. What I really liked was that behind the facade of this cruisy Californian, he really did get to what I call the brass tacks. First, the importance of high-quality wine for a business and for the long term of a business. And second, the need to empower the winemakers. We had lots of winemakers working with us and for us, and he made sure they were all running at 100 percent and wanted to achieve 150 percent. That corporate environment is a tough one, growing that way, and to do that in it is legendary.

9. Is there something that happens at the end of crush every year?

I’m always thirsty for a margarita or a paloma. That’s kind of my signature drink at the end of harvest. It’s not exclusive to the end of harvest, but I often feel like one then. And I always love the end-of-harvest long lunch, where you don’t need to rush back to the winery to check on ferments. That’s always a good session. If it becomes dinnertime, that’s even better.

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

The wine business has this funny facade of romance and art and all the rest of it, and I think people forget the business side and the science side. It always surprises me when people ask how I became a winemaker, and I say I did a master’s in applied science, and they say, “Oh, really?” There’s a lot of science in it, but people don’t see that. And they think that if you make it, it automatically sells, and that’s clearly the hardest part, selling it. Those are the areas people get wrong, or forget about, or don’t know about.

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

I’ve made plenty of mistakes, but nothing monumental (touch wood). My most challenging harvest was my first in Italy at Marco Felluga – Russiz Superiore in Friuli, which was my second European harvest, in 1996. It was the time of the flying winemakers, and the Europeans were asking how New World winemakers were making these fresh, bright wines. They wanted to do that too, so they flew me over. But I think their view of a winemaker was quite different from ours. I was green and really new to it all, and they put me in a lab, because I think they typecast me as an oenologist who must operate out of a laboratory. They put me in with this highly strung Italian oenologist, and everything was archaic. The lab equipment was really old school and everything was naturally in Italian. They were asking me for analyses, and I was trying, and I just couldn’t get it right.

Finally the owner looked at it and said, this is not working very well. I was stressed out. He put me in the winery, and that’s when it got a lot better. I could function. I knew what I was doing, or at least I could look like I knew what was going on. So, it was more of a situation than a singular issue.

After that vintage I did a short internship with Nicola Manferrari at Borgo del Tiglio in Friuli, and that was inspiring. He taught me one question I still ask myself whenever I slip into get-it-done mode and just follow protocol: Why am I doing this, and is it necessary? It’s the same question Gary always asked. When two people on opposite sides of the world teach you the same thing, it sticks.

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

This is interesting, and it’s a sign of the times. Last harvest I started to program AI bots to do a lot of the calculations you regularly use in harvest for making additions, adding yeast and acid and all the rest of it. It was amazing, but I still go back through and do the calculations by hand the way I always have, which is probably a good check anyway. I couldn’t help myself. When you’re adding stuff to wine, you can’t take it back out. One day maybe I’ll get away from that, but for the time being, the double check is by hand.

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

There was one winemaker, and she was lovely, so I won’t name a name, but it was my first harvest, and we were out in the vineyard about to pick some Pinot Noir. She said, “To get Pinot Noir perfectly ripe, you need to let it shrivel a little bit on the vine. You want to see some shrivel.” I was pretty new to it all, and I thought, okay, that makes some sense possibly. Pretty much by the next vintage I started thinking about it and quickly realized that as soon as it shrivels, you’ve really missed the boat. That’s a sign you’ve actually missed it. To be fair, it wasn’t really a Pinot Noir area either.

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

I’m trying to remember. The marc trucks always used to have names, particularly at the wineries in Australia. At Château Tahbilk, where I worked in ’96, I believe they called the truck Betty, a big old bunker of a Bedford. Nothing else off the top of my head, but I’m sure there were others.

15. When someone who knows nothing about wine walks in, what do they already know that you can build on?

Fundamentally, people know what they like. They might not be able to name the villages in Burgundy, but they know whether they like a certain variety, or whether they like sour or sweet. People eat food, and they know what tastes and characters they like in food. Do they like acidity? Do they like sweetness? That’s where you build. It’s the simplest way, and it grounds them.

16. When someone pours your wine for a stranger, what do they need to know that isn’t in the tasting notes?

I always come back to people and place, because that’s what resonates for me, and I think that’s what’s most intriguing. I’m driving through some amazing places every day, and I think, wow, I wish people could see this.

I make a wine in collaboration with a winemaker in the Douro, Oscar Quevedo. His grandfather planted the vineyard, and we make a single-vineyard wine from it called Duo Mistura. It’s a field blend, which is what mistura means. If you’ve ever been through the Douro, the vineyards are carved into the hills, into the schist, and it’s incredible. The guy’s grandfather planted this, it’s a field blend, and it’s cut into the schist. If you could taste that, which you are in effect, it’s got to give you another level, another layer.

17. What would someone have to watch you do to understand this wine?

That’s an interesting one. People always question me when they see the protocol I use for Chardonnay, though theoretically you can taste the outcome. I still try to keep it simple, but I fraction it. The different blocks come in and get fractioned into different components, and each component goes down a different processing path, and then they all come back together to form the finished wine. In theory you can taste it. But unless you understand where all of those elements went and came back from, you’re missing a layer of understanding that seeing it would give you.

18. What’s your favorite wine that you don’t make?

Anything starting with a B out of Italy is a good start for me. I really love the wines of Piedmont, the Barolos and Barbarescos, and if I had to pick a favorite wine, one I often recommend, it’s Produttori del Barbaresco. I’ve been there and visited, and I’ve tasted a lot of their wines over the years. First, I think they’re really great value for money. Second, I worked in a cooperative in France, the Cave Coopérative de Vic-Fezensac, and I can see how challenging that is. Produttori is a cooperative, a really successful one, with a whole village, a whole area, working together, and the wines are sublime. As you go up the range, there are increasing layers of complexity and focus, and the range is excellent. It’s my go-to wine for home and for recommending.

19. When you make a great one, do you know right away?

Picking is such an important time. Mother Nature has the overwhelming hand in this whole thing, in the growing season and the making of the wine, but when you pick it, you know whether you’ve got it dialed in. That’s at least 50 percent of the outcome, the picking and the fruit. And then the ferment. I’m a big believer in the ferment. If you get the ferment right, and you can smell it when it’s a happy ferment, you get this lushness and freshness. It frames the fruit and enhances the expression, and it really determines how the wine is going to age. If you manage a really successful fermentation, you’re so much further ahead of a lot of people, and then it’s all downhill from there.

And you know it when you don’t get it right. You taste the fruit in the box when it comes in, and you know it’s undercooked or overcooked, and the ferment is a problem. Typically, poor-quality fruit won’t ferment so well, won’t age so well, and won’t settle so well. High-quality fruit with all the right elements clarifies really easily and ferments really easily. You can really tell based on those things.

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

I’ve been making an Oakville Cabernet for a number of years off a pretty well-known vineyard. After pouring it, what I’d say is, kick back and watch it evolve. The evolution in the glass is what’s really intriguing, from where it starts, when you’ve just pulled the cork and you’ve got that freshness out of the bottle, and then as the aromas and flavors and everything evolve. I think that goes back to my love for Italian wines, which do exactly the same thing.

Bonus. What does this work take out of you that most people don’t think about?

That’s a really good question, because I think it’s what keeps a lot of us in the business too. You really are offering a huge personal element. My name’s on the bottle, for example, so you pour your heart and soul into this. People ask what the most rewarding part of this business is. We certainly didn’t get into it for the money. There were a lot better pursuits for that.

What drives me goes back to my first vintage. It was the day before harvest, and a winemaker opened a bottle of Charles Heidsieck Blanc des Millénaires, and the whole room got super excited and happy. I thought, man, that’s amazing that a wine can do that. The happiest moment for a winemaker is when they see a table of people having a great time with their bottle of wine. That’s the most rewarding part of it, and I think it shows how much emotion and effort and passion goes into it. It’s got nothing to do with money. You’ve added to this great, memorable time, and isn’t that a wonderful thing? Otherwise, we’d be making stuff that doesn’t do that.

Follow-ups, answered in writing

What did the flying winemaker years in Europe and Australia teach you that a fixed cellar never could?

Diversity, and all of it fast. In a few short years I worked with different winemakers and wineries, each with its own philosophy, practices and equipment. You’d arrive, work out how a cellar ran, and be making decisions within days. You’d often get a level of responsibility and autonomy well beyond your years. A fixed cellar teaches you one way of doing things, and teaches it deeply. Flying taught me there are a dozen ways, and how to pick the right one for the fruit in front of you. It was a fast track.

You went from running winemaking at two of the biggest wine companies in the world to smaller projects like Lula Cellars in Anderson Valley’s Deep End. What did you have to unlearn?

Lula Cellars is one of several smaller consulting projects I work on, not a single move from big to small. But the shift is real, and I’d sum it up as practices over processes.

At a senior level in a large company, you have to get the people and the processes right, otherwise chaos ensues. In a small winery, processes are still important, but you have much more time to focus on the practices, from the vineyard through to the winery. That’s not to say winemakers in big companies don’t care about the details. They do. It’s just been my experience in the roles I’ve had.

At Naked Wines your customers funded your wine before it was made. How did knowing who was buying change the way you made it?

The Naked Wines model is really clever, and it’s the reason I started working with them. For winemakers it solved three big problems. Winemaking is cash-intensive. There’s always the risk you won’t sell the wine. And most importantly, in the three-tier system you typically don’t know your customers. That last one matters most, because at the end of the day I’m making wine for the consumer, not for anyone else. Having direct contact with the people drinking your wine is amazing, and it’s valuable. I listen to every individual review and rating, and when I see a theme, I make winemaking adjustments.

What does Portugal ask of you that California doesn’t?

Apart from great travel experiences, Portugal keeps me curious. I’ve always traveled a lot, and it’s important to keep doing it. It reinvigorates me and fuels the fire for winemaking.

For example, while working on the Duo Mistura red blend over the last couple of years, I started tasting a lot of Portuguese whites and learning more about the lagar system. I’m not a fan of the orange wine movement, but I’m intrigued by skin contact in whites and the character it brings. I applied what I learned there to the Alexander Valley Sauvignon Blanc I make under my own label. The result is a lovely citrus, tonic-like quality that I really like, and that I believe customers find appealing.

What did New Zealand put in you that still shows in the cellar?

New Zealand has a small wine industry, but a very modern and progressive one. Its size gives it a beautiful simplicity, and that was a great place to grow up and start out. The industry is ambitious by nature, but you had to start at the bottom and earn your way up. I spent years laboring in vineyards and cleaning cellar floors, tanks and equipment before anyone let me make a decision. I’d like to think those traits have stayed with me: keep it simple, keep pushing forward, and never be above the work.

Recorded over Zoom on November 4, 2026. Answers are drawn from the transcript and edited lightly for length and clarity. The follow-up answers were written by Matt after the call.