With Kenwood Vineyards in the news this week for closing, selling, and possibly being reopened by one of its former owners, Gary Heck of F. Korbel & Bros. in Guerneville, it seemed like a good time to revisit some of Kenwood’s history.

Kenwood Vineyards was founded in 1970 on Highway 12 in Sonoma Valley at the site of the former Pagani & Sons Winery, which had been around since the early 1900s, the land bought by Amedeo Pagani in 1905. After planting grapevines in the late 1880s, the Pagani family built a bulk winery in 1906 that lasted through Prohibition. When heir Julius Pagani died in 1969, his brother John Pagani (an accounting professor) sold the winery to a group of friends and former students he had taught at Santa Clara University.

The friends – John Sheela and Mike and Marty Lee, whose sister Elizabeth was married to John – turned it into a premium wine producer that by the mid-1980s was making more than 100,000 cases of wine, most of it Zinfandel and Cabernet Sauvignon. Masterful Mike Lee served as winemaker. An architect, Elizabeth designed the buildings.

Sauvignon Blanc and Chardonnay soon also came into play and prominence, and the winery continued to grow, making 250,000 cases a year by the 1990s with an estate vineyard that spanned 200 acres at its height.

The winery became especially well-known for The Artist Series, a Cabernet Sauvignon bottling released every year with a who’s who of artist-commissioned labels; the Jack London Vineyard single-vineyard bottlings; and Sonoma Series blends.

Graphic artist and printmaker David Lance Goines (1945-2023) famously designed the Art Nouveau-inspired artwork, menus, and posters for Chez Panisse (and was an early boyfriend of Alice Waters), but was a familiar designer of wine labels too, the most well-known of them for Ravenswood, Neyers, and Merry Edwards.

But it was his 1975 Kenwood Vineyards label for the winery’s Artist Series that got everyone in trouble. Goines’s label was a pencil sketch of what he called “Reclining Nude in Vineyard,” a nude woman lying between the vines (also known as “Naked Lady”). It was immediately deemed “obscene and indecent” by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (BATF), known today as the TTB, which has label approval.

When the winery resubmitted the same label in 1997, it was approved. So there you go, a scandal one year, and A-okay another.

These were the Heck/Korbel days: Heck acquired a 50-percent share of Kenwood in 1996 and bought it outright in 1999, doubling production over his tenure to more than 600,000 cases.

That was eventually enough to entice outside interest. International wine and spirits conglomerate Pernod Ricard bought the winery, brand, inventory, facilities, and four vineyards from Heck in 2014 for a reported $100 million, its first still winery in California (it also owned sparkling wine house Mumm Napa until last December). An earlier deal to sell Kenwood to Banfi Vintners in 2012 fell through.

Pernod Ricard’s best-known wine brand at the time was Jacobs Creek in Australia. It also had Brancott Estate in New Zealand and Spain’s Campo Viejo, among others; that wine portfolio was sold to Australian Wine Holdco Limited/Vinarchy in 2025.

More lucrative have been Pernod Ricard’s mega-spirits brands Absolut, Jameson, Chivas, Malibu, and Beefeater, not to mention Kahlua, Monkey 47, and Del Maguey.

Pernod Ricard is currently in discussions to possibly merge with Brown-Forman, which once owned Sonoma-Cutrer before selling the property to Duckhorn. Another giant of the global spirits world, among Brown-Forman’s brands is Jack Daniel’s.

But when it entered the Sonoma County wine business, Pernod Ricard worked with existing Kenwood winemaker Pat Henderson to evaluate the property, vineyards, and brand, according to Wine Business Monthly, and increased the focus on Sonoma County, reducing the share of lower-priced California appellation wines, amping the focus on higher-end wines.

Alas the Pernod Ricard period has come to an end with the North Bay Business Journal reporting last week that Kenwood Vineyards has sold for $4 million to Kenwood Winery Land LLC, an outfit led by Heck.

What’s next is a mystery. The Kenwood website says “Closed until further notice. Check back in April for updates.” So the big conglomerate is out, a local Sonoma County family is back in. Let’s hope this historic winery lives on to fight another day.