James Harder

In Calistoga, the work begins with a piece of Napa Valley that was built for utility and has been repurposed for wine: a restored 1930s gas station now operating as Tank Garage Winery. Since 2014, James Harder has owned and made wine there, using the site’s built-in looseness as part of the method. The project favors curiosity over polish for polish’s sake, and the name signals that from the start. Trailer Park Pretty, a White Zinfandel, is the clearest example: a wine made to challenge low expectations for the category and to show that style can be recast with intent, not inherited by default. James Harder trained at Simon Fraser University, then moved through the wine business in a sequence that reads like a working education in how the trade functions. He started as marketing employee at Vincor International, later becoming Vice President of Marketing at Vincor International, where the commercial framing of wine became part of his toolkit. He then became employee at Inniskillin Winery and employee at Wilson Daniels before co-founding Nine North Wine Company. Each step added a different layer: marketing, presentation, distribution, and ownership, all of which shaped the way he would eventually approach his own labels. At Tank Garage Winery, James Harder has been owner and winemaker since 2014, working in the restored 1930s service station he started the winery in that year with Jim Regusci. The setting does more than house the operation; it establishes the terms of the work before the first bottle is opened. It reads as deliberate space-making: a little retro, a little rebellious, and fully aware of its own stance. That stance carries into the wines and into the language around them. The method is intentionally open, with room for instinct and play rather than rigid formula. As Harder puts it, "We’re not bound by anything, and we’re a Napa winery starting out of a garage so let’s act more like a garage band, and we pursue what interests us, what piques our curiosity." For a trade reader, that says less about branding than about process: a winery built to follow questions, not only templates. The bottles lean into surprise instead of reinforcing category expectations. Trailer Park Pretty is a nuanced White Zinfandel made as a play on the assumptions surrounding the style, while Love & Pride, released in 2019, is a limited-edition white blend connected to Tank Garage’s Tank Cares charity initiative and LGBTQ Connection. The wines differ in expression, but they share the same habit of re-framing what a label can mean. His current work also includes co-ownership and producer-owner duties at James Cole Winery in Napa Valley and producer-owner work at Farm Collective Winery. Taken together, these roles place him across more than one wine project, but the Calistoga garage remains the clearest expression of his winemaking voice.