I’m sixty-nine years old now, and when I pour a glass of Morrison Estate Reserve Pinot Noir for visitors to my tasting room, they often ask me about the property—the rolling hills, the perfectly aligned vine rows, the beautiful stone winery building with its cathedral ceilings and French oak barrels. I smile and tell them the truth that I couldn’t tell anyone five years ago.
“This is my estate,” I say. “I bought it. I built it. I own it. Every vine you see—mine. Every bottle—mine. Every acre—mine.”
What I don’t usually tell them is that keeping that secret nearly cost me everything, but also saved me from becoming the third dead wife of a man who made widows wealthy just long enough to rob them blind.
Let me start at the beginning, when I was Katherine Morrison, a thirty-four-year-old single mother working as a real estate agent in 1989, walking into a bank in Sonoma Valley to ask for a loan to buy five acres of raw land. The loan officer actually laughed when I explained I wanted to plant wine grapes.
“Ms. Morrison,” he said, not even bothering to hide his condescension, “do you have any experience in viticulture? Any background in agriculture? Any business partner with expertise in the wine industry?”
“No,” I admitted. “But I have a vision, I have the down payment, and I have a work ethic that will outlast anyone’s doubt.”
He denied my loan. So did the next bank, and the one after that. It took me four tries before I found a lender willing to take a chance on a woman with more determination than credentials. The interest rate was punishing, but I signed those papers with hands that wouldn’t stop shaking—not from fear, but from the sheer electricity of possibility.
My daughter Emily was seven years old then. Her father had left when she was three, deciding fatherhood wasn’t compatible with his dreams of becoming a musician in Los Angeles. His child support checks were sporadic at best, nonexistent at worst. It was just me and Emily against the world, and I was determined to build something that would give her a future.
Those first five acres were nothing but dirt and possibility. I worked my real estate job during the day, showing houses and closing deals, then spent every evening and weekend on my land. I learned to read the soil, to understand drainage and sun exposure, to plant vines in straight rows that looked simple but required mathematical precision. Emily would come with me after school, her small fingers learning to tie the young vines to their support posts while I explained what we were building.
“Someday, baby,” I told her as we worked in the golden California twilight, “these vines are going to produce grapes that make wine people will pay good money for. And this land is going to be ours—really ours. Nobody can take it away.”
It took three years before those first vines produced anything worth pressing. Three years of the town gossips taking bets on when I’d give up and sell. Three years of equipment breakdowns and learning curves so steep they felt vertical. Three years of juggling mortgage payments and praying for rain at the right times and sun at the right times and no unexpected frosts that would kill a season’s potential.
But in 1992, I harvested my first crop. The yield was small, the quality inconsistent, but it was mine. I found a custom crush facility that would press my grapes for a reasonable fee, and I bottled my first hundred cases of Morrison Estate Pinot Noir with labels I designed myself on my home computer.
I sold exactly forty-three bottles that first year.
But I didn’t quit. I expanded gradually, carefully, buying adjacent parcels when they came available, always stretching my finances to the breaking point but never quite beyond it. By 1995, I had fifteen acres planted and my first vintage that earned a positive mention in a local wine magazine. By 2000, I’d expanded to fifty acres and opened a small tasting room in a converted barn on the property.
The breakthrough came in 2005 when Wine Spectator gave my 2003 Reserve Pinot a ninety-two-point rating. Overnight, my allocation list went from twenty people to two hundred. Restaurants started calling. Distributors who’d ignored my emails for years suddenly wanted to carry my wines.
By 2010, Morrison Estate Winery had grown to seventy-five acres of prime Sonoma Valley terroir. I’d built a proper winery building—beautiful stone construction with temperature-controlled barrel rooms and a tasting room that could seat forty guests. My wines were consistently scoring in the high eighties and low nineties. I employed a full-time vineyard manager named Carlos Rodriguez, who’d been with me for eight years and knew every vine as intimately as I did.
The story doesn’t end here — it continues on the next page to discover the rest 🔎👇
