Peter Heitz

Study at University of California, Santa Cruz gave Peter Heitz the technical base that later had to hold up in the cellar, where the work becomes seasonal, practical, and unforgiving of loose judgment. At Beringer, the Associate Winemaker role put that training into direct use. Since 2007, he has been winemaker at Turnbull Wine Cellars in Oakville, where estate vineyards and cellar decisions have had to meet on the same terms: cleanly, with discipline, and with enough restraint to let site and season stay visible in the wine.

“ The goal is to create elegant, enduring and structured wines that are rooted in our estate vineyards, while striking that perfect balance between interesting and delicious.” In Heitz’s terms, structure is not separate from drinkability; the work is to hold both in the same bottle. That puts the emphasis on balance, texture, and longevity, with the estate vineyard as the fixed point the wine has to answer to. “ I approach each wine as a narrative, telling the story of a specific time and place.”

That framing keeps the cellar attached to context: each vintage is shaped by what the season allowed, what the site gave, and how the work at Turnbull Wine Cellars in Oakville carried those conditions through to bottle. The result is a style that reads as composed rather than forced, with the vineyard still audible in the finished wine.

Peter's signature wines include Fortuna Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, 2010 Fortuna Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Black Label Cabernet Sauvignon, Pierra Cabernet Sauvignon, and Leopoldina Vineyard. Taken together, these wines sketch the range of his approach, from vineyard-driven bottlings to wines that reflect a more layered, cellar-honed interpretation of Cabernet Sauvignon. They are the names most closely associated with his work, and they reveal a winemaker attentive to both identity and continuity, to the distinction of individual sites and the coherence of a house style.