Foley Family Wines

Keeping the big picture in focus

Lisa Evich works the blend and the vineyard read at once as Winemaker for Southern Sonoma at Foley Family Wines in Santa Rosa. Lisa Evich arrived in 2024 with a career built at the laboratory bench and the cellar floor before she took on wider responsibility across Chateau St. Jean and Sebastiani. Her training runs through Sonoma State University and University of California, Davis; her first station was as a laboratory technician at William Hill Winery, before winemaking roles at Simi Winery, Pine Ridge Vineyards, and Arrowood Vineyards & Winery. That path matters here because Foley Family Wines is not a single-room cellar with one estate outside the door. It is a Santa Rosa headquarters for a family-owned wine and spirits group, with estate properties and tasting rooms held under one operating frame. Evich’s current remit belongs to Southern Sonoma, where vineyard-driven wines and the stewardship of Cinq Cépages require both continuity and a firm hand on detail. Her own sentence for the work is plain: “When crafting exceptional wines, the key is to keep the big picture and the details in focus all at once.” At this scale, that is not a slogan. It is the discipline.

Estate fruit under a wider roof

Foley Family Wines & Spirits was established by Bill Foley in 1996, and its Santa Rosa office carries the coordination of a portfolio rather than the intimacy of one public-facing winery estate. The craft identity sharpens when the lens moves to Foley Estates, a key estate-focused brand in Sta. Rita Hills, where Chardonnay and Pinot Noir lead the program. The house’s own language is spare: family owned, estate grown. Its production story rests on vineyard control, strict winemaking protocols, and a micro-farming program that uses soil pits and aerial photography to read soils and topography at fine scale. The clearest figure attached to that farming context is 500 acres under vine, with emphasis on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. The named current bottlings give the program a sharper edge: 2023 JA Ranch Chardonnay and 2023 T Anchor Ranch Pinot Noir. No barrel regime, yeast protocol, or aging duration is published for these wines, so the method is best understood through the facts the house does give: estate growing, block-level attention, and a narrow varietal language built around still white and still red wine.

A headquarters with vineyards beyond it

The room in Santa Rosa is quiet by nature, more office and operating center than cellar door. That distinction shapes the place. The tactile work happens across the estates, in vineyards and cellars whose names carry the consumer-facing story; the headquarters holds the decisions that connect them. Foley Family Wines sits inside a professional environment tied to multiple properties, so the texture is not the romance of fermenters in the next room. It is the quieter discipline of a large family-owned group keeping estate identity legible across regions, labels, and hospitality programs. For Evich, that means the station is broader than one tank row. The pass runs through Southern Sonoma, through Chateau St. Jean, through Sebastiani, and through the benchmark of Cinq Cépages.

Why the scale still asks for the hand

Scale can blur a wine program when it treats vineyards as inventory. Foley’s strongest claim moves the other way, toward estate fruit and appellation-specific work, with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir carrying the Foley Estates line from Sta. Rita Hills. Evich’s current chapter sits beside that larger architecture, not as a boutique counterpoint, but as a maker’s role inside it. The close work remains the same: read the site, hold the blend, keep the details from disappearing into the system. The concrete test is still a bottle on the table, and here the name to hold is Cinq Cépages.