Hanna Winery Bottles First Grillo Grown in California
July 14, 2026
Healdsburg, CA
Hanna Winery has released California’s first Grillo. This 2025 vintage wine was grown in Sonoma County’s Dry Creek Appellation and bottled on June 11, 2026. Grillo, a white cultivar native to Sicily, is a cross of the indigenous Catarrato and Zibbibo (Muscat of Alexandria).
Grillo has a long history in Sicily where it was traditionally used to make Marsala and more recently has been reinvented in dry styles. A tiny amount of dormant wood was acquired by Hanna’s winemaker Jeff Hinchliffe, then grafted and planted in 2023 to a 1.2-acre site on the steep terraces of Chris Hanna’s Dry Creek Mountain Vineyard.
Hinchliffe hoped that this cultivar, noted for resistance to heat and drought and in Sicily, would be “a great conduit for our vineyards metamorphic red boomer soil – and to do so consistently across difficult vintages. Mountain grape growing is challenging – you can have two great vintages and then a desiccating heat wave in third. We are hoping Grillo’s reputation as being heat hardy holds up on our site.”
The 2025 growing season, however, was cool, which may be ideal for establishing young vines, but didn’t test Grillo’s heat resistance. “We were able to pick before the September rains and October heat spike,” Hinchliffe noted. “Grillo’s berries are large and spherical –perfect for resisting raisining, although, again, we were not challenged in this regard. Our emphasis in 2025 was in vine development, not fruit production. We dropped laggard clusters to allow the vine to shunt energy away from fruit and into the roots and trunk.”
The fruit was beautiful at harvest, with no shrivel, rot or damage, and ideal basic chemistry. The grapes were whole cluster pressed, and Hinchliffe was pleased that he “squeezed up to 1.2 bar without having a huge jump in pH or bitterness.” The Hanna Grillo was barrel fermented with cultivated yeast in two neutral French oak barrels, then aged on lees in for eight months.
Hanna’s 2025 Grillo was bottled without heat and cold stabilization and without sterile filtration. “This vintage’s focus was on learning, not stylization,” stated Hinchliffe. “Our winemaking has low opacity, we eschewed water additions, extended skin contact, new oak, concrete and malolactic.”
According to Hinchliffe, tasting the wine during elevage revealed a flamboyant honeyed, native buckwheat, shortbread aroma, with nothing to betray its muscat lineage. It is both zingy and rich, and because of Hanna’s Dry Creek Mountain’s soils’ high iron content, it lacks the saline, cationic notes found in wines grown on Hanna’s Bismark Mountain property in the Moon Mountain District. “Grillo presents here as a cultivar that needs little adornment. Its future looks bright on this site. We will work with non-inoculated fermentation in the future, as well as expanding our plantings to our Russian River Valley vineyards.”
The Grillo on Chris Hanna’s Dry Creek Mountain Vineyard is planted along with Aglianico, Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon, Nero d’Avola, and Danse de Neuf, a field blend that includes eight different varieties.
By Winemaker, Jeff Hinchliffe
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About Hanna Winery
Hanna Winery & Vineyards is a family-owned wine company that includes wineries in both Santa Rosa and Healdsburg, two vineyards in the Russian River Valley and one each in Dry Creek, Alexander Valley, and Moon Mountain. Hanna has dual identities as both the internationally distributed standard bearer for Russian River Sauvignon Blanc and as micro producer of terroir respecting esoterica available direct to customer.
