AAPI Legacy

BlueStream takes immense pride in the contributions the AAPI community has made to the wine industry, both past and present. From the thousands of 19th Century laborers who built the wine caves still in use today to over 160 prominent wineries from Seattle to San Diego owned and operated by Asians and Asian-Americans, their impact has been profound.

One of BlueStream’s central tenets is to showcase the diversity these Asian-owned brands bring to the wine world is. Our new wine shop in Chinatown, the heart of San Francisco’s Asian community, is the foremost purveyor of the premium wines produced by these proprietary wineries. 

Here are several of the landmarks of the Asian men & women who have shaped the West Coast wine industry since the 1870s.

Buena Vista
Buena Vista Winery is the second oldest winery in California, founded in 1857. Located in Sonoma, it is a historical icon. The winery was founded by a wealthy Hungarian named Agoston Haraszthy, who purchased the property. He contacted Ho Po, a Chinese labor contractor from San Francisco, who sent up 150 Chinese laborers to help build Buena Vista, including their wine caves. These caves are still in use today and visitors can still see the hand dug markings inside along. Photos of the Chinese men working in Buena Vistas fields and bottling wine are currently displayed in the tasting room. It is estimated that 80 percent of the workforce that help build up Sonoma County’s wine country were Chinese, as they originally came to California for the Gold Rush and then later the transcontinental railroad, and were looking for work. It is even assumed that between 1856 and 1869 the Chinese labor force planted the majority of Sonoma Counties 3.2 million grapevines.

Schramsberg Vineyards
Schramsberg Vineyards and Estate is located in Calistoga, California in the Napa Valley and is known for its production of sparkling wine produced in the méthode champenoise. The vineyard was originally founded in 1862 by Jacob Schram, a German immigrant. This historic landmark holds a Victorian house, a winery, old barn and wine caves hand dug by Chinese laborers in the 1880s. These icons remain virtually unchanged even today. Schramsberg has also played an important role in President Nixon’s “Toast to Peace” with China’s Premier Zhou Enlai in 1972, with their Blanc de Blancs sparkling wine served.

Kanaye Nagasawa
Kanaye Nagasawa was an American winemaker in California, the first former Japanese national to live permanently in the United States. Nagasawa came from New York to Santa Rosa, California in 1875, where he eventually took over the famed Fountaingrove estate as an award-winning winemaker, eventually becoming the top wine producer in California. In Japan he acquired the title of the “Wine King of California” and was called “the Robert Mondavi of his time”. Nagasawa passed away in 1934, but his construction at the estate has become a landmark in Sonoma County.

Château Montelena
Château Montelena was founded in 1882 by Alfred Tubbs and sits at the foot of Mount Saint Helena. Tubbs used his fortune from his previous rope business during the Gold Rush and a warehouse store to buy land in Calistoga where he build and home a winery. The winery’s original name was Hillcrest Estate but after the winery burned down it was replaced by the two famous stone buildings and was later named Chateau Montelena. In 1958, the Tubbs family sold its estate to Yort Wing Frank and his wife. Together they added to the property a Chinese garden and Jade Lake. A decade late the winery sold again, this time to Lee and Helen Paschich, who brought on Jim Barrett as a partner. They, along with winemaker Mike Grgich, won best white wine in the historic “Judgment of Paris” wine competition. Today, Bo Barrett is the winemaker at Château Montelena.

Clos Pegase
Clos Pegase was established in 1982 by Jan Shrem, who relocated to the Napa Valley after retiring from the publishing business. Working with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, an architectural design competition was held for a winery building for Shrem. The winner was Michael Graves and several years later Clos Pegase Winery was built. Shrem is well known for his love of history through art, which may have came from his first wife, Mitsuko, a Japanese woman he met while working in Japan. He married Maria Manetti Farrow in 2012 before selling the winery to Vintage Wine Estates in 2013. In recent years the Shrems have donated $10 million to help build the Manetti Shrem Museum of Art at the University of California, Davis, $3 million to the San Francisco Opera, and $1.5 million to KQED in San Francisco.

Dr. Paul Gee
Dr. Paul Gee is a Radiation Physicist and the first Chinese American Viticulturist in Northern California. He is an award-winning winemaker and very loved amongst his peers. Currently, he grows his fruit in Napa and sells to the famed Bouchaine Winery, which sits right next door to his property. He has an incredible life story, starting in the rice fields of Southern China to the Golden State of California.
Photo from Napa County Historical Society.

Dr. Su Hua Newton
Dr. Su Hua Newton and her husband founded Newton Vineyard outside St. Helena, California in the Napa Valley in 1977.  Raised in London, she met her British husband Peter Newton in 1972, while Peter was creating his wine brand in Napa, the famous Sterling Vineyards. After selling Sterling, they developed the first vineyard on the famed Spring Mountain, transforming one square mile of the hillsides into one of Napa’s leading estates, Newton Vineyards. The amazing Mrs. Newton also holds a Ph.D. in Clinical psychology while being a winemaker, entrepreneur, and professor.