Our story
There is no actual “Crosby Roamann” person. The name of our winery is derived from two of Sean’s grandparents — Norma “Peachy” Crosby and Sally Roamann. Sally was a stage-performer in the Roaring-20s — and who knows what else. She later founded a department store named Roamann’s where her daughter, “Peachy,” occasionally worked, but Peachy was a poet and a firebrand and a mystic and a dreamer and was destined for other things. Sean grew up very close with his family, and credits his grandfather for bringing wine into the family tradition. Since there is no greater testament to fine wine than to share it with family, over a meal prepared with love, Sean named the winery with Peachy and Sally in mind.
The beginning: 2003 – 2009
Brooklyn, NY: an unlikely place to start a winery.
It all started in Brooklyn, NY. We were still children then, but we were in love. Juliana worked at a large publishing house in Midtown Manhattan, and Sean was a newly minted associate at a boutique law firm uptown. We were married one year, then our children followed the next. Life began to swim with possibilities.
In the midst of this, two of our friends from college were engaged, and we traveled to San Francisco for the wedding over a long weekend away from our girls. This was our first trip from New York to northern California, and we found ourselves in paradise.
We had never before seen the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands, Sonoma County’s golden hills, or Napa Valley’s astonishing, simple beauty.
Back in Brooklyn, we became obsessed with the idea of uprooting our small family and moving west, starting anew, and finding a work / life balance that was desperately lacking from our everyday lives back then — lots of long days and long nights, the Brooklyn / Manhattan commute, two full-time professionals starting careers, with two infants (read, “twins”) in tow.
We were determined to find a way to return to northern California, but there was no easy way to make it happen, and so the years slowly ticked by, and we waited for an opportunity. The Great Recession — aka the Global Financial Crisis — had set in. We were lucky simply to be employed, but we were resolved — “Crosby Roamann” would become a reality, we just needed an opportunity.
So we founded the winery from our tiny Brooklyn apartment, and we started to put together the means to make it more than a mere dream. We traveled back to the north bay of San Francisco routinely and, in the meantime, we made wine wherever, whenever, and however, we could — locally in New York at first, and later in Napa Valley.
In 2009, we returned to northern California and began scouting custom crush locations in Napa. We rented a space in Napa, and by 2010, we had made the decision to make the big plunge.
We left our day jobs, sold the Brooklyn apartment, packed up the family’s Volvo station wagon with all our belongings and our twin daughters, and drove “way out West,” to start our lives over again.
It was the beginning of the great adventure of Crosby Roamann.
2010 – 2014; the formative years.
In the beginning, we made our wines at White Rock Vineyards. White Rock has been a breeding ground for young winemakers for over thirty years, and we were lucky, excited, and grateful to work there. This is where we started to experiment with non-interventionist techniques, natural winemaking, barrel fermentation on small lots, and spontaneous fermentation.
This is where we learned the basics of fermentation science and started to think seriously not just about “terroir” but about practical production considerations, or “technique.” This is where we started to learn not only the chemistry, but also the art.
In the meantime, when we weren’t on the crush pad or in the cave, we were in the library. We studied at U.C. Davis, in the Viticulture & Enology Department, earning our certificate, and continued our studies outside of the classroom. We studied everything we could find on viticulture, at first, and then fermentation science. No source was too small or insignificant to ignore.
We continued to make wine at White Rock Vineyards for the next five years, losing ourselves in the tunnels buried deep beneath Atlas Peak, sharing meals with the Vandendriessche family during harvest, and soaking up as much about viticulture and enology as we could from every source available — from the proprietors Henri and Claire, and from their sons Christopher and Micheal, who now ran the estate; from Jaime and Sara and the rest of the intermittent cellar crew. From everyone who stopped by or made wine at White Rock over the years, including John Kongsgaard, Lee Hudson, and Jason Kesner — winemakers we would emulate in the years to come.
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Mary Oliver, The Summer Day (1992)
We later worked alongside Robert Mondavi Jr., at Mondavi’s FOLIO winery (the old Carneros Creek Winery, now owned by Kieu Huang), and PUNK DOG Wines (now the Eric Gordon Wine Studio).
We learned something new everywhere we went, and from each of these experiences we took an important lesson that brought us closer to our ultimate goal — building our own winery.
Along the way, we traveled extensively and continued to taste and develop our palates and wine experience. We became intimately familiar with some of Napa’s backwaters — we drove long stretches of highway beyond Lake Berryessa, we hiked the intimate outcrops on Stags Leap, we explored small vineyards on Wall Road and Mount Veeder. We paid careful attention to our ferments, and performed all of our own winery work.
Our wines from this period are still some of our personal favorites.
2014 – 2020
“The Crusher District”
In 2014, we purchased an abandoned warehouse in the “Crusher District” of Napa Valley — at least, that’s what they were still calling it back then. The developer broke ground on our warehouse in 2007 but never completed it, and it sat there, unfinished and empty for the next seven years. The rest of the warehouse complex (our neighbors) was partially occupied by JuiceBox, a custom crush winery (now The Wine Foundry) and Paradise Pools. We finished the construction ourselves in 2014, and converted our unit to a winery and obtained our winery license in early 2015.
This was a crash course in winemaking — what we have since come to refer to as the “prayer and bootstrap” method of building a winery. The fruit for our 2015 Chardonnay arrived on the morning we were pouring the concrete for the crush pad. We produced an infinitesimal amount of 2015 wine, just two tons of Chardonnay, two tons of Merlot, and one ton of Cabernet, plus some Sauvignon Blanc for a friend.
The winter of 2016 was quiet, rainy, and cold. We watched the wines age in our own space. We made ambitious new plans and conceived grand designs. We couldn’t have been happier.
We had accomplished something we could only have dreamed of ten years before.
One of the things we learned during this period of diving deeply into the wine industry is that while winemaking is known for being both an art and science, one of the things you have to learn simply by doing it is technique — and there’s really no substitute for simply getting your reps in. One of the things that we wanted from the beginning was to be personally responsible for the wines that we shared as “Crosby Roamann.”
It wasn’t enough for us just to make wine at a custom crush facility, with a consulting winemaker, a couple cellar hands to do a lot of the actual manual labor, a bottling truck to bottle everything for us, a label designer, a website designer, you get the picture. Juliana wanted our hands to touch every bottle. We wanted there to be an “us” in each of our wines.
And we wanted the wines to express themselves — their terroir, their vintage, their hearts. Nothing else would do.
It slowly became apparent, however, probably around the middle of 2016, that we were running out of cash. We had just purchased a home in the beautiful and quaint town of Sonoma, where we had decided to raise our daughters, and we were building a winery from scratch, just as we were raising two children . . .
And there’s something else we should mention . . . while we have usually been fortunate and hard working and successful, the wine industry is a tank of great white sharks, and it is mostly populated by billionaires, which we, most assuredly, are not.
What we originally lacked in resources, however, we made up for in other ways (mostly a combination of grit, passion, and perseverance).
So, while we continued to slowly build our dream, Sean went back to work, helping other people build theirs. He spent most of the next six years employing his legal and financial experience working with a number of highly regarded and critically acclaimed winemakers and winery owners. He performed the administrative and back-office tasks that every winery requires – bookkeeping, compliance, and administrative support. And he listened, intently. He learned everything he could about running a successful winery – from how to make the wines to how to structure the company and the finances – from not only some of the most successful people in the wine industry but some of the most successful business people in the world. (If we said their names, which we won’t, you would know who we mean.)
In the meantime, Juliana held down the fort at Crosby Roamann. It wasn’t ideal, but no one ever said it was going to be easy – and as we mentioned before, what mattered was that it would be us. We were going to make it work. We still performed all of our own winery work, and now we were doing it in our own space.
Looking back, the wines from this period of time are . . . inconsistent. Given the opportunity to explore and experiment with everything we had ever wanted to, we took liberties that in retrospect we shouldn’t have. There were some failures. For example, we created the eponymously labelled “Sean W. McBride” series of wines, and we made them all naturally, ultimately winding that project down in 2021. And we made a lot of Pinot Noir . . . a lot. Not all of it very good.
Then again, there were bright points. The 2016 Crosby’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon was phenomenal, and it was during this time (2015) that we started a new project called Bon Ton Wine Cellars with a very dear friend, and that project has turned out to be one of the most successful in our winery careers. (We later bought out our friend of their share and have continued the project on our own.)
Bon Ton Napa Valley is a celebration of joie de vivre. Each label has new artwork from the 1920s.
And the truth is, 2017, 2018, and 2019 were the halcyon years. We didn’t know it then, and we weren’t yet making the quality of wines we truly wanted to (and that we did know), but the winery had slowly done better, and better, and better, every single year. We were making reasonably priced wines largely for the restaurant market and selling them By-the-glass to restaurants all over the country, as well as Canada, Japan, and China.
Things were going very smoothly. Sean had grown his winery consulting business to five employees and over a dozen winery clients on retainer. We were finally ready to make the down payment on a vineyard property in Napa Valley that had been originally planted by Andy Erickson and was receiving 97+ point scores for its Sauvignon Blanc.
2020 – 2024
Viticulture: great wines start in the vineyard.
We were in Los Angeles selling wine on March 14, 2020, at a newly opened, gorgeous restaurant in Beverly Hills when we received the call that they were closing the restaurants, the airports, everything.
Just like for everyone else, it felt like the ground beneath our feet had given out. Miraculously, we made it back to northern California before the lock down kicked in. And then, we waited.
The first thing we decided to do was focus on our new vineyard. We had replanting to do. The land had originally been planted entirely to Sauvignon Blanc, and the originally plantings were nearing the end of their useful life. Plus, we did not need that much Sauvignon Blanc. We ripped and replanted a portion of the vineyard that year and replanted with Merlot. The following year we removed more of the SB and replanted with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, and Petit Verdot.
This was a cool climate site, by Napa Valley standards, but situated on a very sandy and well-draining piece of soil. We had good water, and a good aspect to the sun — with half slightly eastern facing and half to the west. We knew that we would get a big yield without careful canopy and fruit-zone management, so that would be something to be mindful of, but it was manageable.
This was Right Bank of Bordeaux terroir, and we loved that.
We knew exactly what we wanted to grow on this very specific piece of earth and exactly how we wanted to make these very specific wines.
Along the way we added small plantings of Semillon, and Chardonnay. The Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon produce our Estate Sauvignon Blanc, and our Chardonnay is a stand-alone varietal designate.
The Bordeaux (red) varietals were planted to produce one single cuvée — our Estate Cuvée Napa Valley Red Wine, typically 600 (9L) cases plus a small number of large formats. In exceptional years, we also produce a small amount of a varietal reserve — Crosby’s Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon — from selected barrels of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Slowly, in the years that have followed since we purchased our vineyard, some things have changed: We hired Silvano Herrera as Cellar Master, we incorporated better equipment at the winery, and we instituted better techniques. We have begun to fine tune our viticulture, our barrel aging program, and our enology.
But some things haven’t changed: We continue to travel widely and to share our passion for this place in the world with people who love wine all over the globe. We continue to study everything we can about the wine industry and to incorporate new and better ideas and techniques in viticulture and enology whenever we can.
Perhaps most importantly, we are still committed daily to one single pursuit — producing the finest wines possible from this very unique place in the world.
Past, Present, and Future …
A boutique winery in Napa Valley, CA
It all started in Brooklyn, NY, but it has landed us here, and we couldn’t be happier. Sometimes people ask us if we have plans to expand, and the answer is no. Our only plans are to continue to practice consistency, balance, and excellence in the production of our estate wines, and to continue to travel extensively to share our passion for Napa Valley with people all over the world.