11:40 pm
August 21, 2026
Brosseau Vineyards, Outside of Pinnacles National Park
“Jon is a fucking legend,” Hardy Wallace keeps whispering to me.
We’re standing in the middle of Brosseau Vineyards, high in the hills west of Pinnacles National Park, tasting grapes two days before harvest. Hardy has been buying fruit from this vineyard since 2013, although his interest in Chalone wines started much earlier. His father had developed an affinity for Monterey County wines, particularly those from the Chalone AVA, and Hardy grew up knowing the region. When he began making wine himself, he knew he wanted to work with grapes from these hills.
Meghan and I drove down from San Francisco this morning for a weekend at Brosseau and Pinnacles National Park. Somewhere along the way, Hardy remembered that we had mentioned our trip and sent us a text. He was heading to the vineyard too. Harvest was scheduled to begin around 10 p.m. Sunday, and he was coming down to taste the fruit, check ripeness and bring some juice back to Sonoma for the other winemakers who source grapes here. He waited for us to arrive before heading into the vineyards.
We spent the afternoon bouncing from block to block in his truck, hopping out to taste Grenache, Chenin Blanc and a large mixed block of white grapes that Hardy uses to produce his best white wine, Full King Crab. He shows me how to taste the grapes for ripeness, what to look for in the seeds and why he'll occasionally leave his grapes hanging after other winemakers have decided to pick. We talk about Brix, drainage, grape shatter and how newly grafted vines need more time to develop their character. I couldn't have imagined I'd be getting a lesson in winemaking today, and I would've been too embarrassed to ask for one. I've been wanting to learn more about the process for a long time, so I'm soaking up every bit of knowledge Hardy is willing to share.
We also visit the exact spot where Hardy encountered his first Dark Watcher. Hearing his firsthand account in the fading evening light, standing among the same rows of vines where he experienced an unexplained presence, is chilling. He describes this as the place where “the veil between worlds feels thinnest.”
At nearly every stop, we end up talking about the soil. Brosseau sits in the Chalone AVA, a small wine-growing region tucked into the hills west of Pinnacles National Park. Limestone runs through these hills alongside granite and volcanic material, creating an unusual combination of soils that Hardy believes gives the wines their distinctive character. He talks about the vineyard with an enthusiasm of a geologist describing a particularly exciting rock formation.
We also talk about the people who made this vineyard possible. Jon Brosseau and Dick Graff, the man credited with establishing Chalone as a respected California wine region, spent years working these hills. Dick had an airstrip built on his property, hosted elaborate parties and carved caves into the hillside to cellar his wine. Jon, meanwhile, was clearing the neighboring land, planting vines and figuring out how to get enough water up the mountain to keep them alive.
Hardy keeps returning to Jon's name. Apparently, Jon and Jan are staying at the inn this weekend. Until today, I had only known Jan as the woman who runs the inn, and she had been particularly eager to arrange an evening wine tasting with Meghan and me. Hardy points out that the Brosseaus don't come up here very often anymore and wonders whether they've made the trip because they know we're interested in Jon's story. I don't know whether that's true, but I'm honored to have the opportunity to meet him.
3:36 pm
August 22, 2026
Pinnacles National Park, CA
We spent most of the day hiking through Pinnacles National Park, searching for California condors and photographing the enormous volcanic formations that rise above the trails. We spotted two condors circling above the western cliffs in the morning, one of which eventually settled on a ledge so far away that my 400mm lens could barely make it out.
Our route took us from Juniper Trail through High Peaks and the Steep and Narrow section. We arrived shortly after sunrise, with the cool morning shadows still covering the trail, and hurried toward the overlooks hoping to catch the condors before they rode the warming air away from the cliffs.
Hoping for condors gave us our start time, but our primary shoot objective was “good rocks.” And boy did we find them.
Meghan is starting to read the strata more clearly, recognizing individual bands of rock as they continue across the cliffs and formations throughout the valley. Even better, she's started philosophizing about time and the enormous scales of the universe while we hike. I couldn't be more in love with her growing curiosity about the natural world:
- “Planets are crazy. If this took millions of years here, and other planets do the same thing, how is ours the only one that has developed life?”
- “Is rock even a solid if it’s that malleable? Does time also change the states of matter?”
- “Wait are air, water, and earth even separate elements? Air is just an ocean with less density. And these rocks are just liquid that settles over a much longer time scale.”
10:22 pm
August 22, 2026
Brosseau Vineyards, CA
This evening, we were back at Brosseau for an evening of wine with Jon, Jan, and Phil, the Inn’s on-site caretaker.
Jon grew up farming in Oklahoma. When he first surveyed this land in 1978, his son Bill was sitting above his shoulders, strapped into an infant backpack to keep Jon's hands free. The hillside looked very different then. Most of what is vineyard today was still covered in brush and woodland, but Jon noticed something unusual about the ground. There were piles of white soil scattered across the property, and he suspected they might contain the limestone he had been looking for.
On a hunch, he bent over, took a pinch of the white powder between his thumb and index finger and tasted the dirt. He recognized something unusual about the calcium-rich soil and believed he'd found exactly what he was looking for. Jon purchased the land, bought a bulldozer and a tractor, and started clearing it himself. It took two years to clear the first 20 acres, and by 1980 the vines were producing grapes for harvest.
Today, vineyard names feel like a bit of a commodity. They travel around the wine world on the labels of bottles made hundreds of miles away. They appear on restaurant wine lists and in tasting notes, often becoming nearly as recognizable as the wineries themselves. It's easy to forget that someone had to make the vineyard first, and that the beautiful rows of vines we associate with wine country were once something entirely different.
Jon wasn’t afraid to work the land himself. To get in there, get dirty, and chase a hunch that years of farming had taught him to recognize. There was no established estate waiting for him, just a difficult hillside with interesting soil and a farmer who believed he could make something of it. By his own hand, some of the best grapes in California would take root on this wild hillside.
The working acreage was planted gradually. Each year, Bill would come home from school for the summer and suggest that they plant more vines. Jon would agree, and they would clear another block. The vineyard gradually expanded to 42 acres of working vines across a 160-acre property. Bill eventually became a respected winemaker himself, producing wines for Testarossa, Brosseau Wines and other projects.
Jan is quick to point out that she was “the one with the good ideas.” She encouraged Jon to plant Pinot Noir and Chardonnay when neither seemed like an obvious choice for the region. She believed California wine was moving in that direction and wanted to get ahead of it. She was right — the bet paid off when California became world renowned for the varietals. Decades later, the vineyard continues to evolve. Several Pinot Noir blocks have recently been grafted over to Chenin Blanc, a variety that Hardy is especially excited about working with. This year will be the first harvest from those newly grafted vines.
The Brosseaus seem comfortable with the idea that a vineyard must continue to change. Their decisions reflect decades of observing the land, learning what grows well and understanding what the winemakers who buy their grapes are looking for. Jon has spent nearly half a century working this property, but he still talks about it as something that requires constant attention.
Water
Growing grapes in these hills presents a fairly obvious problem: there isn't much water.
Jon tells us the property historically receives around 12 inches of rain per year, and some recent years have been closer to seven or eight. With so little rainfall, dry farming isn't a realistic option. Every vine needs irrigation, which becomes a significant challenge when the vineyard sits high above the valley on a remote, rolling hillside.
For a while, Jon and Dick Graff solved this problem by taking turns driving a 4,000-gallon tanker truck up the narrow mountain road to irrigate their vines.
“That was fun for about a week,” Jon laughs.
Eventually, they built a reservoir down in the valley and developed a system to pump water up into the hills. This created another challenge: distributing it evenly across the property, where the elevation changes considerably and the porous soils allow water to drain quickly. Jon assures me that there isn't an inch of vineyard that doesn't receive its water.
“It better work. My pressure system was designed by a Lockheed Martin engineer,” he says.
The more Jon talks, the more I begin to appreciate the work required to establish a vineyard in a place like this. It wasn't enough to find promising soil and plant vines. He needed to understand the land, solve the problems it presented and continue adapting as the vineyard grew. What looks like an idyllic landscape today is the result of decades of practical decisions, experiments and persistence.
In 2011, after a five-year conversion, Brosseau became the first fully CCOF-certified organic vineyard in the Chalone appellation. Jon describes the decision as another adaptation to what California winemakers wanted to buy. Bill, who makes wine from the family's grapes, is particularly proud of the organic certification.
Their approach to farming seems to reflect the relationship between growers and winemakers throughout this region. Hardy and several other winemakers return to Brosseau year after year, developing relationships with the family and with particular blocks of vines. They know the fruit, understand how it changes through the season and trust one another's judgment about when it's ready to harvest.
Jon's work doesn't end when the grapes leave the vineyard. It continues through the wines made by people who have come to know this land almost as well as he does.
8:17 am
August 23, 2026
Brosseau Vineyards, CA
I'm drinking coffee on the patio this morning while an unimaginably large group of hummingbirds moves between the lavender bushes. Bees are working their way through the flowers, and the condors and vultures have begun their daily flight west from Pinnacles toward the coast. Phil is continuing his season-long battle with the hornets that keep taking over the decorative wine barrels.
Last night, Meghan and I crept into the vineyard after dark to photograph the Milky Way. Hares ran between the vines, and coyotes called to one another from the surrounding hills. Without the lights of a nearby town, the sky was exceptionally clear. We spent much of the evening wandering the rows with our cameras, stopping occasionally to listen to the animals moving through the brush.
The property is beautiful in a way that feels almost exaggerated. Rolling hills of vines surround a sprawling, single-story inn wrapped around a communal patio. Old oak trees stand between the blocks, and the mountains of Pinnacles rise to the east. From the higher points of the property, you can look west toward the coast. It has nearly everything I picture when imagining a quintessential European vineyard estate, but the atmosphere is remarkably unpretentious.
After spending the weekend with Jon and Jan, I think I understand why. Brosseau is first and foremost a working farm, and the people who built it still think about it in those terms. Jon talks with weathered exuberance about tractors, irrigation systems, soil samples, and which varieties are worth planting. Jan remembers the decisions they made decades ago and the ways the wine industry has changed around them. Neither seems particularly interested in romanticizing the work.
When Jon describes what drew him to this land, he returns to the soil he discovered in 1978.
“I could tell the soil was something special. And I knew that if I couldn't make the world's best wine, I could at least grow the grapes for it.”
Today, Brosseau fruit is used by winemakers throughout California, including Testarossa, Enfield, Hobo, Under The Wire, Marine Layer and Hardy Wallace’s Extradimensional Wine Co. Yeah!. Each approaches the fruit differently, producing wines that reflect both the vineyard and the decisions made in the cellar. Pick up a bottle of Brosseau Chenin Blanc from any of these winemakers and you’ll taste the minerality and expressiveness of the terroir right away.
Hardy will return to Brosseau tonight for harvest, joining the other winemakers and crews who will begin picking around 10 p.m. The grapes we've been tasting all weekend will leave these hills and travel to wineries across California, where they'll be fermented, aged and eventually bottled. Months or years from now, we'll get to taste what became of them.
I'm looking forward to that. After meeting Jon and spending time among the vines, I suspect I'll approach those wines a little differently. I'll be thinking about the hillside before the vines were planted, the bulldozer that cleared the first 20 acres, the tanker trucks climbing the mountain and the family that has spent nearly 50 years figuring out how to grow grapes here.
Our time at Brosseau Vineyards inspired another story for the upcoming Issue No. 03 of Cypress Magazine, Liminal.
In Depth and Weightlessness, Meghan McNeil explores the ancient geology beneath Pinnacles National Park, the character those rocks give the wines of Chalone and the remarkable relationship between winemaker Hardy Wallace and the landscape he returns to each harvest. Her story follows the forces that shaped this place long before the first vines were planted, and the ways those forces continue to influence the life growing here today.
Pre-order Issue No. 03 now to read the full story when it releases.
