Meet the Wine Families of Paso Robles

The exhaustive work ethic, soul-sucking stamina and never-ending stewardship required to develop something as complicated and risky as your own vineyard and winery isn’t exactly the stable, easygoing life that most parents wish upon their kids. And yet that’s the dream of so many vintner-parents. The wise ones keep this secret close to their chests. Many grown children of winemakers come back to the family business, to the dirty boots and the digging through grapes.

At least that’s how it’s going in Paso Robles. This relatively young California wine region is currently enjoying a remarkable streak of success at succession. As the first—and in some cases, second—generation approaches retirement age, the next in line are gladly stepping up to the barrel. To witness this torch-passing firsthand, I spent a couple of very busy days in Paso earlier this year, meeting with different wine families in various stages of transition. Aside from often feeling like their therapist—scribbling down feelings that I’m not sure had ever been said aloud—our conversations revealed lessons anyone can relate to, whether they’re into wine or not.

Keepers of the Legacy

My first stop was Bella Luna Estate Winery in Paso’s El Pomar District, where Nichole Healey-Finn greeted me with black-and-white photos of her father, Kevin Healey, working the historic vines of Pesente back in the 1970s. The elder Healey launched Bella Luna in 1998, running it alongside longtime friend and retired commercial pilot Sherman Smoot until Smoot’s death in a crash in 2022.

“My mom used to ground me by putting me in the cellar with my dad,” recalled Healey-Finn. “That’s really not punishment.”

That led her to study wine at California State University, Fresno, after which she spent eight years winemaking in Australia, meeting her winemaking husband, Lukas Finn, along the way. After years of returning home to Paso for harvest, the Finns came back for good in 2018. She’s now the general manager of Bella Luna, with her husband working alongside her father.

“This renewed our passion for winemaking,” said Healey-Finn, who’d grown tired of the industrial methods she’d seen in Australia. “We’re trying to carry on the legacy, and not screw it up.”

Up the hill, Finn and Healey were tending to their seven acres of bush vines.

A Childhood in the Vines

Across town in the Willow Creek District, Matt Trevisan’s oldest daughter, Gabbi, graduated from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and now works for his Linne Calodo Cellars.

“All of my kids have worked in the vineyard and winery throughout their childhoods,” said Matt, explaining that Gabbi had switched majors from dance to chemistry. “She was a ballerina who’s now making wine. It’s fun to have conversations with her about how the wines are fermenting.”

The elder Trevisan knows how all-consuming this life can be. “You have to be willing to fix things,” he said. “It’s like a mini-city, with water lines, electricity, wastewater … No one else is there to do it for you.”

He welcomes Gabbi’s involvement, and is waiting to see what his younger kids—a son in high school and another daughter in college—will do. “Something deep inside of me thinks that the Trevisan family has an inherent desire to make a family business that gets passed along for generations,” said Matt.

Cellar Kids

A couple oak-shaded miles away, the Cherry family of Villa Creek Cellars and the MAHA Estate are further along into this transition, with daughter Camille and son Henri already filling critical roles.

“We’ve always been in it,” said Henri of growing up around the vineyard under the watch of his father, Director of Winemaking Cris Cherry. He remembers putting in long hours in the cellar, hoeing star thistle when he was still just a high-schooler.

But because so many of their friends were also the children of vintners, it took a while for the Cherry siblings to appreciate their upbringing. “It didn’t occur to me that this is not the average childhood for most people,” said Camille, who today handles customer relations. She worked a 2017 harvest at another Paso operation, Linne Calodo Cellars, before coming onboard full-time the following year. “I was baffled by the realization that there are people who don’t have the opportunity to be out in the rolling hills and running around feral as a kid.”

The passing of the baton is particularly poignant here: JoAnn Cherry—Camille and Henri’s mother and the winery’s creative director—died last year after a fight with cancer. “She was always the one to bring my dad’s way of thinking and my way of thinking back to the customer’s perspective,” said Camille.

Cris gave his children ample space to find their own way. Henri in particular took advantage, dabbling briefly in the film and commercial real estate worlds before finding his way back to wine. He moved back permanently in 2024, and now works both on branding and in production alongside Winemaker Oliver Mikkelsen.

“If you have the ability to let them grow into it, as opposed to forcing them, that’s good,” said Cris.

When Your Boss Is Your Dad

When I met Maggie and her father, Bob Tillman, at Maggie’s house in the Adelaida District hills above Alta Colina Vineyard & Winery, Bob was fiddling with the wall. “That’s multigenerational business,” said Maggie. “My dad comes into my house and changes the temperature.”

After spending decades at Hewlett-Packard, Bob turned a garage winemaking hobby into his post-tech career in 2003. Maggie came home to Paso after graduating from New York University with a degree in linguistics in 2008, a recession just setting in and no job prospects on the horizon. She made lemons out of lemonade, helping to develop the winery’s branding—“You set us up, basically,” said Bob. Alta Colina became her full-time job in 2011, which has allowed Bob to focus more on the vineyards.

Not that it’s been completely smooth sailing. “The last two years, as we’re thinking about transition, there’s been more friction,” admitted Bob. It was perhaps inevitable: A tough economy and wine-industry woes have required decision-making that would be stressful regardless. But the emotional aspect of working with family has been difficult, which caught Maggie off guard. “The only reason this conversation is happening is because time is passing and people are aging,” she said. “That lesson is never easy.”

Bob isn’t planning to go anywhere soon, though. “I’m really glad he’s not trying to run off into the sunset,” said his daughter.

You Never Leave the Office

Though always humble in style, Castoro Cellars is a massive operation, involving hundreds of acres of vineyards, multiple brands that make hundreds of thousands of cases, a distillery called Bethel Rd., the annual Whale Rock Music & Arts Festival and a mobile bottling business. No wonder founders Niels and Bimmer Udsen, whose first commercial vintage was in 1983, are consulting with a succession-planning firm to manage the transition to their sons, Luke and Max Udsen.

“To be candid, there are things that I am more comfortable saying to them than to my parents,” said Luke, who now runs the creative and marketing aspects of the company. 

For Max, who runs the distillery, which also makes wines, coming home a dozen years ago was all about contributing new skills. “I didn’t want to just come to the winery and fill a cellar master role over someone else—that didn’t feel right,” he said. “But then I had a niche to fill … I was able to provide value without taking over a job that already existed.”

Work-life balance remains an elusive goal. “There’s no work and non-work,” said Max. “You’re always in it.”

Hope You Like Star Thistle

“Here comes my dad,” says Justin Smith as Pebble Smith, a veterinarian-turned-vintner who planted the James Berry Vineyard with his own hands in the early 1980s, pulls up. In elementary school, Pebble uprooted the family from the beaches of Encinitas and deposited them in the hinterlands of Paso.

The transition hit Justin hard. “I puked my first day of school,” he recalled. 

Things evened out from there. Justin planned to be a botanist in tropical jungles, and in preparation, grew up helping with his father’s vines. He never made it to the jungle—it turned out there were plenty of interesting things to do closer to home—and launched Linne Calodo Cellars with his friend Matt Trevisan in 1997. Three years later, Justin created Saxum Vineyards, which quickly became the poster child for Paso’s burgeoning Rhône and red-blend movement. Many of its wines are made with James Berry grapes.

Justin’s own kids, Colin and Olivia, grew up just steps from those historic James Berry vines. “I worked in the vineyard during high school, pulling star thistle,” said Colin—evidently a popular task for next-gen winemakers in their youth.

After graduating from The Evergreen State College in Washington State, Colin worked vintages in Oregon and Santa Cruz, settling back in Paso in 2022. He’s adjusting to working at Saxum for his dad. “It’s not like work goes away when you get home,” said Colin. Olivia is now working on the hospitality side at L’Aventure and Booker Wines.

“That’s something we know very little about,” said her dad, who’s hopeful that she’ll one day bring what she’s learning back to Saxum.

The Barrels Will Always Beckon

In 1998, after running his own winery in Bordeaux for 15 years, Stephan Asseo abandoned the rigid rules of his native France for Paso and began producing blends of Syrah and Cabernet Sauvignon under his label L’Aventure. Further breaking from tradition, he chose not to impose his chosen career on his three children.

Still, things have a way of working out in unexpected ways. His daughter, Chloé, is now the general manager. “He likes to joke I was born in the barrels,” she said as we sat in one of the limestone nooks she designed inside L’Aventure Winery’s earthen cave. “I didn’t think for one second that I would wind up back at the fucking winery,” Chloé, who studied fashion in college, said with a laugh.

Her role is on the marketing side, which complements her father’s focus on production. “My dad is very rustic; he’s a crazy Frenchman,” she said. “He has not changed whatsoever.”

Move Out, Then Come Back

My last evening was spent enjoying lamb stew, polenta and arugula salad prepared by Marci Collins, whose husband, Neil Collins, is considered a godfather of Paso’s progressive era. He’s grown and made Tablas Creek wines since that seminal winery’s beginnings in 1989, but also has run the family’s own Lone Madrone brand since 1996 and Bristols Cider House since 1994.

Their sons, Austin and Jordan Collins, and nephew, Lucas Meisinger, are now deeply entrenched in all of those efforts. “We grew up at Tablas Creek,” said Jordan. As a kid, all he thought about wine was that it was for parents getting drunk. “Wine is stupid,” he recalled thinking. “I didn’t see any other part of it.”

When Jordan interned at L’Aventure years later, the big-picture appeal of wine finally clicked, and he went on to intern at Tablas Creek, Villa Creek and Two Hands in Australia. In 2018, Jordan joined full-time at Lone Madrone, where he is now the head winemaker.

It helped, too, that Neil pushed his progeny and nephew into the family business only after they went elsewhere. “You need to go do your own things,” he told them.

That worked well for Austin, who studied at Humboldt State in far Northern California and worked for Linne Calodo, Domaine Matrot in Burgundy, Beaucastel in the Rhône and Ata Rangi in New Zealand before taking a job as vineyard operations manager at Tablas Creek in 2019. 

“None of us thought we’d be back here,” he said. As for Lucas, after graduating from Sonoma State, he traveled south to Santa Barbara County, falling in with the beloved late sommelier-turned-winemaker Seth Kunin and then Doug Margerum for about a decade. “It wasn’t until I started seeing the A to Z of the business that I realized how unique it was,” said Lucas, who in 2022 returned to Lone Madrone, where he works in a variety of capacities.

Neil is finally ready for this to happen. “It’s hard to spend 30 years doing all this and then let it go,” said Neil. “But this is what I really want. I want them to run with it.”

Just Peachy

Though Jake and Josh Beckett were just kids when their parents Doug and Nancy Beckett founded Peachy Canyon Winery in 1988, they vividly remember those early days. “During harvests, we were running around playing tackle football and watching the families hand-bottle, hand-cork and even hand-label the wine,” said Josh. 

They never expected to stick around. “Paso was just hicks and rednecks and there was no good food in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” he recalled. “I went to the A&W drive up for homecoming.” 

“My brother and I both bailed as soon as we finished high school,” added Jake, who studied anthropology and Spanish at California State University, Stanislaus, intending to enter the Peace Corps afterward. Josh went to the University of San Diego, and stayed in the area until he came home to help his parents set up a sales system in 1998. 

“Then the movement started,” said Josh of the region’s modernization in the early 2000s. “The capabilities of what could come out of here got really exciting.”

The brothers launched their own brand, Chronic Cellars, but never really left Peachy Canyon, where today they’re co-owners and manage daily operations. They’d be happy if their own kids one day followed in their footsteps, though Josh would encourage them to leave for a while first. 

“You need to go work somewhere else; you need to learn from somebody else,” he said. “Bring something to the table, and then you can come back.”

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2025 California issue of Wine Enthusiast magazine. Click here to subscribe today!

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