STEWART JOHNSON traded policy papers for pruning shears—and found purpose in the Petaluma Gap. From his Kendric Vineyards winery on Treasure Island, Johnson makes top-notch wine with Marin County grapes.
Every Sunday, my daughter and I start our day at the farmers’ market at the Marin County Civic Center. We have our go-to vendors: Little Gems and carrots from Front Porch, Star Route, and Longer Table farms, Tuscan olive oil from Eyrie Olive Oil Co., English peas from our pal Christian at Iacopi, smoked salmon from Jeff at Cap’n Mike’s Holy Smoke, every cheese Jacob tastes us on at Tomales Farmstead Creamery and the best Belgian waffles from Alain Dupont’s Waffle Mania truck.
During many of those Sundays, once that waffle was in my daughter’s hands, I knew I had just a few minutes to mosey over to winemaker Stewart Johnson’s booth to see what he was pouring. (These days, Dancing Crow Vineyards occupies his spot.) I was lucky to catch Johnson during his short tenure at the market, and I was smitten—drawn in by his Rhône-like Syrahs with high-toned violets, truffled charcuterie and bold dark fruit; his mineral-focused Viognier and Pinot Noirs full of red-fruited purity and kinetic energy.
Johnson’s label, Kendric Vineyards, centers on an eight-acre estate vineyard tucked into Cayetana Ranch in the Petaluma Gap AVA, in northern Marin County. Over the years, Johnson’s fruit has found its way into the hands of several notable producers— Petite Abeille, Olet’te Wines, Dutton-Goldfield and others. But his bottlings kept me coming back. For years, he’s quietly and persistently worked to prove that Marin can produce serious wine. And I believe he’s succeeded. Some of the best wines I’ve tasted bearing the “Marin County” designation have come from his hard work.
When I met Johnson, 62, this past March at his winery on Treasure Island—where he’s been since 2011—his cool, open-book honesty stood out. He’s as candid about his missteps as he is about his process. “The initial goal was to get it tasting-room ready, then eventually make it crush-ready,” he told me, motioning to an unfinished section stacked with crates.
Before Treasure Island, he made wine at Starry Night Winery in Novato’s Bel Marin Keys. It was housed in one of those tilt-up cement buildings, later relocating to the old Frosty Acres building near the 37/101 interchange. “You probably never knew it, but it had this mural of presidential heads on the side,” Johnson mused. “It was a local landmark—a frozen food warehouse with threefoot- thick cement walls and crazy insulation.”
He made wine there from 2004 until 2009, then moved to Carneros Vintners on Stage Gulch Road, midway between Petaluma and Sonoma. “It was massive for me—a bit of a fish-out-ofwater situation. You’d forget a gasket and have to hike 30 minutes back to your starting point.” He spent one vintage at Trek Winery in Novato before leasing space on Treasure Island.
The space, a former classroom for Navy families, is raw and functional. As we sat down to taste, the institutional lighting and paneled ceilings reminded me of my elementary school days—until Johnson’s wine snapped me back to a delicious reality. A glass of Loup Solitaire, his second-label Pinot Noir picked a little earlier for lift and freshness, was a revelation.
FROM LAW STUDENT TO WINERY INTERN
In 2001 Johnson planted a Syrah vineyard called Reward Ranch in Amador’s Shenandoah Valley. The Marin site—Kendric Vineyards, which is named for Johnson’s father, a dentist who passed away in 2001—was planted a year later. “I’d plant the vineyard during breaks between grad school and law school. I finally finished planting during law school.”
He went to Hastings, now UC Law San Francisco. I asked if he’d ever practiced law. “No,” he said flatly. “I had been in a PhD program in international relations at Yale. When I started, it was all about the U.S.–Soviet dynamic, deterrence policy, all that. But the Berlin Wall came down right as I got there. Russia stopped being sexy. So I veered into pure theory—game theory, mostly. I finished everything but the dissertation. Got the master’s as a parting gift and went to law school, thinking I’d pivot to something more practical. But I hated international law. I ended up doing mostly environmental law.”
I quipped that he should have been in Washington within sight of the Treasury Building instead of on Treasure Island. “Yeah, I wanted to be a mini-Kissinger, bouncing between academia and statecraft. But I didn’t want to do the scut work. The collapse of the Cold War narrative derailed the whole thing. I’d done internships at the EPA and Department of the Interior and realized I wasn’t cut out for policy work. Agriculture looked pretty appealing from that vantage point.”
He eventually married Town Councilmember and former mayor Eileen Burke, a San Anselmo native and practicing trial attorney. Rooted in San Anselmo, raising a family, working crush jobs and taking UC Extension courses, he started scouting Marin for vineyard land. Mark Pasternak of Devil’s Gulch Ranch, cowboy-hatwearing rancher and local Marin legend, introduced Johnson to the Corda family, who agreed to a long-term lease on a hillside parcel off San Antonio Road. The soils drain well, without giving water a chance to pool, which is ideal for grape-growing.
The Kendric Vineyards sit on a hill above pastureland in northern Marin, a couple of miles west of Olompali State Park. The site falls within the boundaries of the Petaluma Gap appellation on the Marin County side, where the soil is red and loamy. “Marin’s geology is all Franciscan mélange, tilted and striated,” explains Johnson. “Soils change abruptly. There are lots of serpentine, clay and magnesium-rich soils—and many terrible soils for growing grapes. But this site drains well and that makes all the difference.”
Johnson manages the Marin site himself, while his mother, Kathleen, now in her 80s, has stepped away from pruning and running the tractors at Reward Ranch in Shenandoah, which she did until a few years ago. In Johnson’s Kendric Vineyards, Pinot Noir, Syrah, Chardonnay and Viognier are planted, and he continues to make wine from Sangiovese, the only grape that remains planted at Reward Ranch. Depending on the year, he produces 1,500 to 2,000 cases of wine in total, selling some bulk wine and grapes to others.
Among them is Jenny Lynn of Olet’te Wines. “In Coastal Miwok Miwok mythology, it was Coyote Olet’te who rose from the Pacific Ocean and blew through the Petaluma Wind Gap,” says Lynn, “shaping what I believe is one of the best places in the New World to grow Pinot Noir. There’s something more wild, electric and alive about grapes growing in Marin soils,” she says, “especially from Kendric Vineyards. The salinity, the structure, the florals—it comes from the terroir, and the intention behind the farming.”
She recalled a night harvest with Johnson where she frantically picked leaves from the bins. “He turned around mid-tractor-run and said, ‘You know, I like to leave some leaves in there. The land, the fruit, the balance—it’s all part of it.’”
But for all its charm, Marin is not an easy place to farm grapes. The county’s western benchlands provide the kind of cool-climate and windy conditions that are typical of Sonoma’s coastline vineyards. And the long growing season and intense Pacific winds build finesse and freshness—if you can get the grapes to ripen. Major producers like Dutton-Goldfield, DeLoach and Keller Estate have all chased fruit here. And Johnson’s Viognier (below) is one of the best I’ve tasted—bright with lemon oil, honeyed on the midpalate and shot through with saline acidity.
Tasting through barrel samples at the Treasure Island winery, and a few older wines (a faded 2009 Pinot Noir followed by a stellar 2013 bottling), I asked Johnson if the venture had ever been profitable. “Not really,” he chuckled ruefully. “I underpriced from the start, thinking about value. That’s not sustainable.”
The lease is also a challenge. “There’s no market for leased vineyard land. If I walk away, it’s 25 years of work and, likely, debt.” Selling grapes is no better. “The bulk market crashed in 2023. It’s been tough.”
Still, when I asked if Marin was worth it, his face lit up. “Absolutely. The profile of the wines is better now than when I started. My issue is, I didn’t build a buffer. So when the market turned, I had no cushion.” Johnson let out a resigned laugh and soberly added, “It’s not about Marin. It’s about me not running a smarter business.”
Lynn sees it differently. “A collective voice is what we need—people like Stewart Johnson are bringing us together to tell the story of Marin. Once the storytelling catches up with the quality in the glass, Marin will take its rightful place on the map.”
