Chris Cooney

The Path

Training at University of California, Davis put Chris Cooney on a technical track before he entered the Napa Valley wine world. There, senior winemaking roles at Provenance Vineyards and Hewitt Vineyards in Napa placed him in a region where vineyard decisions and cellar decisions are tightly linked, and where consistency depends on disciplined attention at each stage.

The Work Today

Since 2025, Realm has employed Chris Cooney as Chief of Winegrowing. The role broadens the lens from winery work alone to the full season around it, with vineyard and cellar treated as connected parts of the same process. For an artisan working at that scale, the task is less about isolated gestures than about sequencing: knowing when to intervene, when to hold back, and how to keep the site legible in the finished wine.

Signature

2010 Hewitt Cabernet Sauvignon and ONDA Cabernet Sauvignon sit at the center of Chris Cooney’s signature. The first marks his work at Hewitt Vineyards in Napa; the second shows the range of his cellar judgment beyond a single label. Read together, they point to wines built with structure and clarity, where the vintage is allowed to show but the architecture stays controlled.

In Their Words “ It took us over 60 blends to arrive at one we could all agree on, that really captured the essence of 2010 in this special place.”

Acclaim

Wine Spectator Top 100 list, #4 for 2010 Hewitt Cabernet Sauvignon (2010), is the recognition attached to Chris Cooney’s work here. The ranking reflects a process that went through more than 60 blends before the final wine was set, which is the kind of repetition and judgment familiar to anyone making for precision rather than speed. It is also a useful measure of how exacting selection can sharpen a wine into something that reads cleanly in the glass.