Another new winery? Well, not exactly.
Dallas native Suzanne Deal Booth has purchased Swanson Vineyards in Rutherford, Napa County. She will be using its current winery, and not building a new one, news appreciated throughout wine country.
With a background in philanthropy and arts education and curation, Deal Booth already owns the Bella Oaks Vineyard and part of the Fahrig Ranch, adding the Swanson property to her portfolio for $10 million.
If you aren’t familiar with Swanson, just remember frozen TV dinners. W. Clarke and Elizabeth Swanson founded their winery in 1985 and majored in pinot grigio, merlot and Alexis cabernet sauvignon, the latter named for their daughter, all with guidance from the legendary André Tchelistcheff.
With the hopes of creating a tasting room mimicking a Parisian salon of the 1800s, their daughter, now Alexis Swanson Traina, took over the salon and made it just that in 2001. (While working on an edition of a guidebook to the Napa Valley, this writer had the good fortune to attend one of Alexis’s early food and wine pairings, which launched the trend in the Napa Valley.)
Vintage Wine Estates bought Swanson in 2015 and eventually closed the tasting room. According to Esther Mobley in the San Francisco Chronicle, Deal Booth first discovered Napa while visiting the Staglin family more than a decade ago.
Apparently Deal Booth is in the process of converting her other vineyards to biodynamic farming, which is indicative of her tendency to buy existing properties and renovate them.
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