Unauthorized

“You have my permission to record because California is a two-party consent state,” Theodora “Theo” Lee tells me, laughing, after I ask her if I may record our interview. I’m trailing her as we make our way into her modest Yorkville Highlands home where she’s come to care for her Petite Sirah vineyard this weekend. She maintains another home in the San Francisco Bay Area where, during the week, she is a Senior Partner and very successful trial lawyer at Littler Mendelson.

I’m struggling to keep up with Lee, who’s a few years my senior but has energy to spare. I was instructed to arrive early as she has a big day planned for us. After a morning tasting, we’ll be heading off to a neighborhood potluck at mid-day, and a bit later I’ll be shadowing her as she hosts a few retailers from out of town.

For now, though, Lee – dressed in a checkered, short-sleeved work shirt and work pants dusty from a busy morning in the vineyard – is eager to share her jewel-in-the-crown wine with me, her estate-grown Petite Sirah, which she bottles under her Theopolis Vineyards label.

This is my first time exploring the Yorkville Highlands appellation. When I visit with winemakers, typically they’ll provide driving directions in advance, and add that upon arrival I’ll see their winery sign and immediately know where to turn. In Lee’s case, she instructs me to look for a little blue address sign with some plants painted on it.

The Yorkville Highlands appellation is located in Mendocino County and consists of about 40,000 acres, straddling the Anderson Valley to the northwest and Alexander Valley to the southwest. That may sound like a lot of land, but only about 450 of those acres are planted to wine grapes. It’s a fairly recent appellation, too, relatively speaking; AVA status was granted in 1998. Growth in this region has been slow these past 18 years. There are only a handful of wineries hidden in this mountainous region. Though various varieties are grown here – including Cabernet Sauvignon, Pinot Noir and Zinfandel – I’m most attracted to its Petite Sirah, for which this area seems ideally suited, due to its hot days, positively frigid nights, gravelly and clay loams, and its high elevation.

During the week, Lee may litigate upon everything from wrongful termination and employment discrimination to race discrimination as a Labor Employment law attorney, but she’s equally as comfortable hopping on her tractor and working her vineyard and small orchard.  Next year will be her 30th anniversary as an attorney. A 1987 University of Texas Law School graduate, she has practiced only Labor Employment Law her entire career because, as she says, “It’s sex, drugs, rock and roll, and hourly wages,” laughing heartily and openly. “You can’t open a paper without seeing a lawsuit about misclassification or off-the-clock work. I enjoy it, but obviously wine is my passion.”

It was Lee’s mentors and colleagues in law who first introduced her to the world of fine wine.  “I grew up in the South, in Texas, on a farm. We had wild Muscadine grapes growing there, and my father used to make home brew. Have you ever had Muscadine? It’s so sweet. It tastes like cough syrup. It’s so nasty! I thought that’s what wine tasted like, so I didn’t drink wine until I moved to California in the ’80s and learned about fine wines.”

Lee learned about wine as a young associate from her colleagues, and, in particular, from her mentor at Littler Mendelson, Barbara Oddone. Oddone, who is now retired, had a home and vineyard in Healdsburg at the time that Lee visited often. Back when she was starting out in law “you didn’t have faxes and emails and all of these other ways to communicate. Basically, if you had a brief due, if you got it done on a Saturday and it was due on a Monday, you drove it to the partner’s house. So, I would go to Healdsburg to deliver briefs for Barbara to review for the following Monday, and she’d invite me to stay for dinner and we would drink wine from her vineyard. I would walk the vineyard, because I’m really an outdoors person. I was driving a tractor by the time I was eight years old.  I fell in love with the wine lifestyle – great wine, great food and being out in the vineyard. Other partners and associates had places in Oakville and Calistoga, so it from them and Barbara that I started to appreciate wine.”

Lee soon began to envision owning her own little vineyard. She is quick to point out that she wanted to be a grower, first and foremost, but land in the Napa Valley, on an associate’s salary, was an impossibility. Her mentors suggested that she look into Lake County and Mendocino County. “In 2001, I finally felt like I could take some equity out of my house and put it into buying a piece of land.  I felt confident I could do this. I kind of knew I liked Mendocino. It’s a beautiful place. I used to visit the coast there. Alice Walker, the author, whom I knew because she went to Spelman [a historically African-American college in Atlanta, Georgia from which Lee graduated], had a place in Mendocino, and we have mutual friends. She lives further out near Boonville, so I looked at properties up there, but then I saw this property in Yorkville.”

The land itself was mostly fallow meadow, redwoods and firs. The 20-acre property came with two sheep and eight chickens, and a house that was in ill-repair. “It was a nightmare. The lady I bought it from was an English teacher from London, and she only spent half of each year here. The room we’re in now [the dining room] was her library. There were shelves on all the walls, floor to ceiling. It had been badly neglected. While she was in England, cats roamed this house and I’m allergic to cats, so I had to get people who clean baseboards and floorboards to come in and take up everything and clean it all up.” She gave the sheep away but kept the chickens. “I knew how to raise chickens and they laid beautiful eggs, but then a fox came one night and killed them all.”

Before escrow even closed, Lee had soil pits dug throughout her property to ensure that it was ideally suited to the growing of fine wine grapes. After learning that her land was suitable for grapes, she went about refurbishing her home and property. She put in a hot tub and pool. “I got in the pool late last night, and the moon was so beautiful.”  She also put in a fruit orchard, but laments her failed cherry trees. “The cherries were so sweet, but one year the birds ate them all and then they never blossomed again.” She seems especially proud of a 500-square-foot deck she had built, “It’s perfect for my bottle release parties for my wine club members. We prep food here,” she says, excitedly, pointing at a small, clean food prep area.  “I’ll have a live band over. We have wine tasting in the garden.” Lee typically hosts about 200 club members annually for her release party.

For the first few years, though, she sold all of her Petite Sirah to Carlisle Winery and a few urban wineries in the Bay Area. She was quite content simply being a grower. Then, in 2012, an ill-timed rain fell during harvest and she rushed to pick her grapes at 23 brix. The buyer at that time (no longer Carlisle) had contracted for grapes at 25 brix, so they rejected the entire lot. Faced with no one willing to purchase fruit at a lower brix level at that time, she decided to have her fruit custom-crushed in Hopland, a few miles from her home.

Her 2012 wines were made entirely on the barter system. She gave the winemakers at the custom crush facility half of her harvest for free, if, in turn, they’d process the other half of her harvest and make her wines for her. At the time, she says, she couldn’t afford to hire a winemaker, and so the barter system worked in her favor. She paid only for the bottles, capsules, corks and labels. Her 2012 Petite Sirah received a gold medal from Sunset Magazine and soon thereafter, Theopolis Vineyards was underway. She began hosting tastings at her homestead, and invited neighboring wineries – sometimes five at a time – to pour alongside her.

Today, Theopolis produces four wines: her hallmark Petite Sirah, which is beautifully balanced, elegant, yet powerful; a very refreshing dry Rosé of Petite Sirah; an arresting, delicate bone-dry Symphony (a hybrid of Muscat of Alexandria and Grenache gris); and an unfined, unfiltered lovely Pinot Noir from nearby Anderson Valley. Her wines are all priced between 20 and 40 dollars, by no means cheap but certainly fairly priced for their high, definitive quality. “I know that a lot of people who buy my wines buy them because of me. If I put a 75 dollar price tag on my wines, they wouldn’t be able to afford it. I’m not a snob and I don’t want to sell my wine to snobs. I am the common man and I want to appeal to the common man.  I actually have always specialized in pleasure in the bottle,” she tells me, “because when I was in high school I used to throw parties and I used to make something called Wonder Punch.”

Wonder Punch, I learn, is made up of Everclear, moonshine, vodka and various fruit punches. Lee would charge party goers 10 dollars to get into her parties and an additional 5 bucks for a cup of Wonder Punch. Lee ran this little enterprise through high school and college. “My boyfriend’s father owned a bar and under alcohol regulations, alcohol purportedly expires, but alcohol really never expires, so he would give me half gallons of the liquor that had been rendered ‘expired.’”  As president of her freshman class in college, Lee threw parties in her dorm room and served her popular Wonder Punch. Lee believed then, as she does now, that “food, wine and drink bring people together from all walks of life. It doesn’t matter what your race, color, creed or orientation is."

As the day unfolds, Lee’s energy remains positively boundless. We head off to the neighborhood potluck where she engages easily and confidently with about 30 or so neighbors, many of them winegrowers themselves. We have to drive deep into a redwood forest to arrive at the potluck site, and I’m starting to get a little fatigued, but Lee acts as if she’s just hopped out of bed after a full night’s rest and has had about three espressos to boot. It’s a good thing she has a lot of energy (“I take vitamins,” she tells me), because she has her hands full.

Lee lost her father earlier this year, in March. Currently, she’s dividing her time between her law work, her vineyard, and visiting her 90-year-old mother, who still lives in Texas.  “She suffers from early-onset Alzheimer’s, but she wants to stay independent, so every two weeks, I go to Dallas and take care of her. My dad had a 150-acre farm [he bought the first 10 acres when Lee was a little girl] and that’s where I learned to drive, shoot guns, etc. So now I’m raising cattle and hay at their farm in Bristol, Texas.” She has clients in Dallas (Neiman Marcus, American Airlines) so she “works it” as best she can.

Lee credits her parents with her tough, no-nonsense approach to life, tempered as it is by an inherent sweetness. She believes she inherited her aggressive and strong-headed ways from her father, while she credits her mother with her tender streak. But there are a few things she inherited that don’t always work in her favor. “My father was domineering and controlling and I have a tendency to be that way, and my mom has to have everything in the right place, so I’m really neurotic about where things go. Everything has to go in its right place. You wash a glass as soon as you use it, etc. So that’s why I live alone”, she adds in a charming deadpan followed by a full-throated guffaw.

She may live alone, but Lee’s life is populated by many adoring wine fans and loyal, ardent friends. She also devotes what spare time she has to a number of charitable organizations. “All women working in the wine business ought to help each other. ‘From those to whom much is given, much is expected.’ I can’t take my legal career and this winery and vineyard and not give back to the community. People lifted me along the way. I have to go and lift as I climb.” To that end, she sits on numerous boards, including the Bay Area Legal Aid, the San Francisco YMCA, the United Negro College Fund, and the California Women Lawyers, to name just a few. “My grandfather was a sharecropper. He didn’t own anything. My father left Midway, Texas at the age of 12 because he wanted a better life for himself. He worked as an orderly and finally saved enough money to go to college and then he met my mother. They would have been married 65 years this past September. It is something that I feel obligated to do – to help others, especially women and minorities. If we don’t help each other, then why are we here?”

Though she admits that the wine business is very demanding and a lot of work, she wouldn’t have it any other way. She is a one-woman show and does all of her own sales. She sells all of her wine through her wine club and directly to restaurants. Just recently she picked up a broker in Los Angeles – her first one. “ I’m an employment lawyer. You start having employees, you start getting in trouble,” she says, laughing. There are many perks to having a wine brand of one’s own, including getting to meet all kinds of interesting people. Through wine, Lee was able to meet her childhood idol, Diane Carroll, who came up to Lee’s home in the Yorkville Highlands and dined with her. “I took her around and tasted wine with her. She is still absolutely beautiful.”

We’re starting to lose the light and it’s nearly time for dinner when we wrap up our chat. Back at her house, she’s eager to put on some jazz music and start dinner. She invites me to stay and share a meal with her, but I have to head out for the long drive home. I tell her I’m a bit tired, and comment one last time on how much I admire her energy level. “I have my hands full, but I really like life. I figure you can sleep when you die, ‘cause you’ll have nothing else to do. I have a thirst for life.”