The Long Way to This Ground
What six vineyards on four continents taught me about wine, soil, and myself
I did not set out to become a winemaker. I set out to understand living things.
Wine was just the door I walked through. Every place I worked handed me a different key - and behind each one was the same room. Healthy soil. Thoughtful farming. A person willing to listen more than they talk.
This is the story of how I got here, told through the people who taught me. I owe them more than I can pay back. The least I can do is tell the truth about what they gave me.
Israel - Margalit Winery
What it is: Margalit was Israel's first serious boutique winery. Dr. Yair Margalit founded it in 1989 with a first vintage of fewer than a thousand bottles. Today it makes around 30,000 bottles a year and still sells out. It became the country's first cult wine, and Yair became one of the founding fathers of the Israeli quality wine movement.
Who taught me: Dr. Yair Margalit is a physical chemist. He earned his PhD at the Technion, spent a sabbatical researching at UC Davis in the chemistry and enology departments, and then wrote the wine chemistry textbooks that are still assigned to students at Davis and wine schools around the world. He literally wrote the book. Then he came home and used it to grow grapes alongside his son Assaf.
What I learned: Dry farming. In one of the most water-scarce regions on earth, Margalit grows without irrigation. Once the vines are established, they live on winter rain and nothing else. That is not a marketing choice. It is a demand made of the plant.
I watched what happens when you stop giving a vine easy water. It sends its roots down. It goes looking. The fruit comes in smaller and more concentrated, and the wine gets a kind of tension you cannot fake in the cellar.
I worked the Bordeaux varieties there - Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot - from mountain fruit in the Upper Galilee and coastal fruit near the Mediterranean.
I remember walking the Kadita vineyard with Assaf and Yair at five in the morning, before sunrise, soaking up every word they said. I was a young buck. It was one of the most refreshing experiences of my life. I shut up and took it in.
What I carry: Struggle, in the right amount, is a gift. It is what builds a root system. I have never stopped thinking about that - in vineyards or in people.
France - Yves Cuilléron, Northern Rhône
What it is: The Cuilléron family has farmed at Verlieu, in the village of Chavanay, since 1920. When Yves took over in 1987, the estate was three and a half hectares. It is now around ninety, across Condrieu, Saint-Joseph, Côte-Rôtie, Cornas, and Saint-Péray. The wine press calls him the leader of Condrieu's new generation. Some people just call him the King of Condrieu.
What makes it hard: The vineyards sit on terraced granite slopes so steep that machines cannot go there. Every task is done by hand. Yves calls it haute couture work - tailored, plot by plot, row by row. It is beautiful and it is brutal.
What I learned: Barrels and blending.
Yves is unusual for the Northern Rhône. Most estates there chase red wine. He splits his production almost evenly between white and red, and his whites are what made his name. Viognier, Marsanne, Roussanne - fermented in barrel with native yeast, aged on the lees, stirred, not rushed. Reds macerated for weeks, then eighteen months in wood.
I learned to read a barrel the way you read weather. Which one lifts a wine. Which one flattens it. When wood is a frame and when it is a costume.
And I learned blending - sitting with a dozen lots and asking not "which is best" but "what do these become together." That question changed how I think about everything, including teams and families.
What I carry: The steep ground is where the good stuff grows. And nothing worth making gets rushed.
France again - Domaine Zind-Humbrecht, Alsace
What it is: The Humbrecht family has grown wine in Alsace since 1620. The domaine as it exists now was formed in 1959, when Léonard Humbrecht married Geneviève Zind and two family estates became one. It sits in Turckheim, just west of Colmar - around forty hectares split into dozens of separate parcels across a handful of villages, including some of the greatest Grand Cru sites in Alsace: Rangen de Thann, Brand, Hengst, Goldert.
It is essentially all white wine. Riesling, Pinot Gris, Gewurztraminer, Muscat, Pinot Blanc. Many people consider these among the finest white wines in the world.
Who taught me: Olivier Humbrecht became the first Frenchman ever to pass the Master of Wine exam, in 1989 - the same year he took over the winemaking. He is also the president of Biodyvin, the biodynamic growers' association. He brought biodynamics to the estate in 1997, earned organic certification in 1998, and biodynamic certification by 2002 - long before the region followed.
He is one of the most powerful leaders I have ever worked for. Not loud. Certain.
What I learned: This is where I first looked at soil through a microscope.
Up until then, "healthy soil" was a phrase I used. In Alsace it became something I could see - fungi, bacteria, protozoa, an entire population living underneath a vine row. You cannot unsee that. Once you have watched soil life move under a lens, every spray decision and every pass with a tractor becomes a decision about whether something lives or dies.
That is also where I saw animals put back to work in the vineyard. Zind-Humbrecht brought horses back for ploughing in 2005 to keep heavy equipment off the ground and stop compacting the soil. They employ roughly one vineyard worker for every two hectares, so most of the work is still done by hand. The compost is made on the farm.
And Olivier tasted every single bin coming in from the vineyard. Every one. He did not delegate that and he did not sample it. If a bin was not right, it did not go in.
I have thought about that more than almost anything else I learned anywhere. He held the highest wine qualification in the world, and he was standing at the crush pad tasting fruit out of a bin. That is what real authority looks like. It is not distance from the work. It is closeness to it.
What I carry: Know your soil at the scale of a microscope and know your fruit at the scale of a single bin. Leadership lives in both.
Italy - Azienda Agricola Foradori, Trentino
What it is: Foradori sits in Campo Rotaliano, a small plain ringed by the Dolomites. Elisabetta Foradori took over her family's estate in 1984, at twenty years old, after her father's sudden death. She did it out of duty, not passion. The passion came later, from the work itself.
What she did: She rescued a grape. Teroldego was the local red variety, and the region had ground it into bulk wine - huge yields, no soul. Elisabetta spent decades on massale selection, finding and propagating more than fifteen distinct biotypes of old Teroldego to save its genetic diversity. She converted the estate to biodynamics and earned Demeter certification. In 2009 she started fermenting and aging in terracotta amphorae ordered from Spain, because clay lets the wine reconnect to the earth without adding flavor of its own.
Then, at the peak of her fame in the 1990s, she admitted she had lost her connection to her own work - and rebuilt her whole approach around getting it back. That takes more courage than any award.
What I learned: The physical work, and the honesty inside it.
I was in the mountains for harvest with Kim - my fiancée at the time, now my wife and the mother of our two young boys. We picked. We crushed fruit. We cleaned tanks. We blended. We bottled. That is the whole job, and it is not glamorous. There is no shortcut between the vine and the glass, and there is no hiding in a place that farms this way. The cellar has nothing to fix the fruit with, so the fruit has to be right.
What I carry: Excellence and humility are the same practice. The most renowned estate I ever worked at was also the one where I spent the most time with a hose in my hand - and the most joy and gratitude in my heart.
New Zealand - Black Estate, Waipara Valley
What it is: Black Estate is a family winery on the clay and limestone hillsides of the Omihi district, in North Canterbury, about an hour north of Christchurch. The Naish family bought the original vineyard in 2007. Pen Naish and Nicholas Brown run it now, across three sites - Home, Damsteep, and Netherwood. All three are certified organic with BioGro and biodynamic with Demeter. The vines are unirrigated. Eric Asimov of The New York Times has called their wines some of the most expressive in North Canterbury.
How they work: Native yeast from their own vineyards. No fining. No filtering. A dash of sulfur at bottling - and sometimes none at all.
What I learned: Two things.
The first was sparkling wine, made the hard way. We made pét-nat from Chenin Blanc - the wine finishes its first fermentation inside the bottle, and you get one shot. No dosage to correct it, no second chance. You either picked at the right moment or you did not.
The second was still Chenin, Riesling, and Pinot Noir on limestone. Cool climate, high acid, unforgiving. Grapes that tell on you.
But the real education there was biodynamic farming as a whole system. Not a certificate on the wall. Compost, cover crops, animals, the calendar, and the understanding that the farm is one organism, not a set of separate jobs.
What I carry: When you take the crutches away - no additions, no corrections, no irrigation - what is left is the truth about your farming. I stopped trying to fix things in the cellar and started fixing them in the ground.
California - DaVero Farms & Winery, Healdsburg
What it is: DaVero sits on Westside Road in the Dry Creek Valley. Ridgely Evers bought the land in 1982. In 1990 he imported olive trees from Tuscany - the first brought into the United States in about ninety years - planted them, and waited. The oil became world-famous. Then, over a glass of Sagrantino di Montefalco at dinner in New York, he decided to plant grapes.
Not the grapes everyone else plants. Ridgely looked at the map, saw that Sonoma sits at the same latitude and shares the same Mediterranean climate as central Italy, and planted Sangiovese and Sagrantino instead of Cabernet. The farm's motto is simple: grow what belongs here.
Today it is a Demeter-certified biodynamic farm with pigs, sheep, chickens, orchards, edible gardens, and around fifteen Italian varieties - Sangiovese, Sagrantino, Barbera, Fiano, Greco, Montepulciano, and more - all fermented with the yeasts that live in their own vineyards.
What I did: I started as assistant winemaker, then led the wine program, and eventually became the winemaker and winegrower - and in practice ran the business. I worked with the Italian varieties. And I worked the ancient olive trees and made extra virgin olive oil.
What I learned: Two lessons I use every day.
The first is that olive trees teach patience better than vines do. You plant a tree and you wait years before it gives you anything. There is no way to hurry it and no way to negotiate with it. That kind of waiting rewires a person.
The second is grow what belongs here. Most of California wine is a story about forcing a place to produce what the market wants. DaVero asked the opposite question: what does this land actually want to grow? Then it built a business around the answer.
What I carry: That question is now the center of my work - in vineyards and in the leadership coaching I do alongside the wine. Not "what should I be?" but "what am I built to grow?" The answer is usually already in the soil and the soul.
Home - Prinsley Wines
We came back from New Zealand in 2019. Kim and I had spent years being handed other people's ground to learn on. It was time to be responsible for our own.
So we started Prinsley.
On our wedding day, the late Rollin Wilkinson, who has been a friend of the family and like a grandfather to Kim - offered us to use his legacy fruit at our first harvest. We said yes (twice) and the rest is history. We brought in Charrdoney from his Dry farmed vineyard and made our first wine.
It was small, and it is slow on purpose. Every place in this story had already taught me what happens when you rush. We chose fruit from growers who farm the way we want to farm. We kept the lots small enough that I could taste every one. We built it so that the wine would be honest about where it came from, even when that meant a smaller, stranger, less commercial wine than we could have made.
Kim and I run it together in Northern California. That is not a footnote. Everything I know about doing this work well, I learned in places where a family was doing it - Yair and Assaf, Léonard and Olivier, Elisabetta and her children, Pen and Nicholas. Every one of them. That is not a coincidence and I do not think it is a small thing.
Now - Yountville
This year, for the first time, I am working on an elite fruit from a family ranch in Yountville - Merlot, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Malbec.
It is the Bordeaux education from Israel, meeting the barrel and blending expirience from the Rhône, meeting the microscope and the horse from Alsace, meeting the hands-on cellar discipline from Italy, meeting the biodynamic honesty from New Zealand, meeting the patience question from Healdsburg.
That is what Prinsley Wines is. Not a style I invented. A conversation between six places that were generous enough to teach me.
Small lots. Careful farming. Fruit that is allowed to say what it wants to say.
I am not interested in making wine that impresses people. I am interested in making wine that is honest, authentic and inspiring about the ground it came from - because after twenty years of doing this on four continents, I have learned that the ground is the only thing that was ever really talking.
Legacy, Inspiration, legacy.
The soil in always beneath you.
Rea Prince is a winemaker, winegrower, and regenerative leadership coach based in Cloverdale, California. He founded Prinsley Wines with his wife Kim in 2019 and works with vineyard owners and founders across Napa, Sonoma, and Mendocino on soil health, biodynamic and Korean Natural Farming practices, and vineyard transition planning.