Kevin’s vineyard is perched at around 1000 feet on Mt. Veeder. First planted in the 1970s using conventional farming and irrigation, it’s a cooler site, impacted by morning fog and breezes from the San Pablo Bay. 

"The place was completely dead when I first visited in 2017," says Thomas Comme as I walk the Hillwalker vineyard with him. 

It’s just after harvest, and the vineyard is still thrumming with energy, making it impossible to imagine what it was like before.

Thomas’ first recommendation to Kevin was to tear out the irrigation lines. 

“I wanted people to get a true picture of the place,” he explains. “And it’s important not to deplete resources like water. So, we went cold turkey on the water. Vines are tough plants—they grow wild in rocks! It’s important to pay attention to them yet allow them to adapt. It’s year five now without water. Now that it is dry-farmed, it ripens one month earlier.”

2019 was the first year of conversion to organic and biodynamic methods. It was also the first year Thomas and Kevin made a wine off the estate.

“There’s no acidification, no added water, and no crushers here,” Thomas stresses. “Just a very gentle bladder press. This vineyard gives mountain fruit, and there’s no hiding from that. We’re bringing back structure and elegance. There are a lot of wines being made now in Napa that people just don’t want to drink.”

Since 2019, Hillwalker has been producing only about 100 cases per year and selling the rest of the fruit to like-minded producers like Jonah Beer at Pilcrow, who I recently wrote about and can be reached by clicking HERE.

“We’ve just had our winery permit approved,” Thomas gleams. “Currently, we only have a small cave that can only make around 500 or 600 cases. But with the new winery, we’ll have the potential to make more.”

There’s nothing new about a wealthy banker coming to Napa, buying a vineyard, hiring a winemaker, and slapping his name on the wine. However, from the outset of this project, Kevin has been determined to be involved in every aspect of grape growing and winemaking, and his dedication is refreshing.

"Our basic principle is that if we don’t like something in the tank, we go back and work on the vineyard for the next harvest."

“I pursued a Master Certificate through the Enology program at UC Davis,” he tells me. “I did this to gain a foundation, but also to not naively jump into the endeavor. It did provide a great foundation, and I have immense respect for the program, but you quickly learn that a program like Davis is really training people to produce wine in a large commercial setting where consistency and uniformity reign supreme. This is the absolute opposite of everything we do. For instance, one of the professors of viticulture was adamant that viticulture and winemaking should be totally separate. This is such a foreign concept to us. Our basic principle is that if we don’t like something in the tank, we go back and work on the vineyard for the next harvest. It’s one of the main reasons we converted to dry-farming, which not only yields much higher quality fruit, but tells you exactly what is happening in the vineyard. Many of the things we do in our winemaking are in direct contravention of the principles you learn at Davis. I believe it’s the difference between being in a small bespoke setting where you control all of the inputs, and large-scale commercial wine production, which is how the vast majority of wine is made, even many cult wines.” 

Thomas and Kevin share the work in the winery and vineyard.

“I never wanted to outsource things at Hillwalker,” Kevin says. “To me, this was an opportunity to stand for something, pursue a set of ideals, and put something unique and representative out into the world. In my mind, you can't do that if other people are doing everything for you. So, I am very hands-on. It’s a complete partnership between me and Thomas, and we make the wine together. I hand sort the fruit, work the tanks, rack the wine, and do everything through to bottling.”

Upon tasting the 2021 and 2022 vintages with Thomas and Kevin, I’m struck by the sense of transparency in both wines. The oak is almost undetectable, which is unusual at this youthful stage.

“Stylistically, the holy grail for us is elegance,” Kevin points out. “We want to make wines that are clearly identifiable as mountain fruit wines, but that combine power, finesse, purity of expression, and are beautiful. We think oak has a role to play but largely gets in the way of what we want to accomplish, which is why we transitioned largely to concrete aging for 2021 and beyond.”

80% of the 2021 vintage was aged in concrete and the rest in French oak. Yet neither the fruit nor the structure are missing that oak contribution. The natural beauty of the wines is striking.

“I’d made the decision to reprioritize spending time outside, in nature,” says Kevin.  “When the opportunity came up to purchase Hillwalker, the property offered a unique ability to combine respect for the land and accessing the unique experiences of being on a mountainside vineyard, with the ability to channel our energy and resources into making a wine that might offer a portal to that world of differential sensory experiences.  It also gave us the opportunity to pursue a set of ethos, and to be about something that we could manifest in a physical form. Thus, Hillwalker was born.

Before I leave, I have to ask about the origin of the name.

Kevin laughs. “Well, after I had exhausted every version of our surname, Greek names, made-up names, and everything in between, I was at the vineyard one day walking up from the lower vineyard and it just came to me, ‘I think I am going to call it Hillwalker.’  The longer I thought about it, the more fitting it became. I am an avid cyclist and former racer. I can remember so many times when I made an arduous climb, crested the hill, and was presented with a vista that was epiphanous. For just a moment, it stops you in your tracks. Everyone has their own journey that can be analogous to that climb I referenced. If, in our little way, through the faithful pursuit of our goals and by following our ethos, we can create a wine that gives someone their own epiphanous moment, that’s pretty special. The name Hillwalker has come to embody this.”