THE GRADE Cellars

Tom Thornton, a New York architect, and Brenda Mixson, who worked in commercial real estate, met on a blind date and bought a 32-acre Calistoga ranch in 1997 without any plan to make wine, initially treating it as a real estate investment. They replanted the vineyard into five Cabernet Sauvignon blocks in 2000, sold fruit to other Napa wineries for years, and released their own first vintage, named THE GRADE, in 2004.

The name and the winery's Sauvignon Blanc label, Sea-Fog, both come from Robert Louis Stevenson's The Silverado Squatters, which describes the old stagecoach toll road, known locally as "the grade," that begins at the edge of the couple's property. Winemaker Thomas Rivers Brown joined at the end of the 2011 harvest and went on to earn a 99-point score from Robert Parker for the estate's Kingly Project Cabernet Sauvignon.

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