Nick Kokonas, right, founder of Tock and Chicago’s Alinea, stands in his Calistoga vineyard with his wife, Dagmara.
Provided by John Troxwell/Nick Kokonas
On the first day in his new Napa Valley home, set on a 44-acre, run-down vineyard estate, Nick Kokonas was pacing around in a robe, questioning what he had just done.
“I got here and was like, ‘Holy s—, I don’t know where to start,’” he recalled. “I was walking around like in “The Big Lebowski” with my coffee, and I was thinking, ‘I might have a White Russian instead.’”
Kokonas had been thinking about getting into the wine industry for 30 years. Sure, he had zero farming experience and the wine industry was in the middle of an unprecedented crisis. But he built his career on taking big swings: He was also completely inexperienced when he opened Alinea with the chef Grant Achatz in Chicago, one of the country’s most acclaimed and influential restaurants. And he knew nothing about software development when he created restaurant reservation platform Tock, which he later sold for $400 million (to Squarespace, which later sold it to American Express).
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Far from the first tech entrepreneur to fall in love with Napa Valley and launch a wine brand, Kokonas does appear to be taking a different approach than the (stereo)typical Silicon Valley executive-turned-absentee-winery-owner with his new venture. He and his wife, Dagmara, have spent the past three years quietly rehabilitating their property and replanting vines, doing much of the physical labor themselves. (He sold his majority stake in Alinea in 2024, which likely freed up his time.) He also hired noted Napa winemaking consultant Maayan Koschitzky to make wine for his new brand, Tangle Ranch Vineyards, which he’s planning to launch this summer — and no, he’s not just making Cabernet, nor will the wines cost $300. And he’s opening Elsewhere, a wine bar in St. Helena, which I reported on earlier this week.
“Chicago will always be home. At the same time, I’m working really hard to make this my second home and part of that is by building Elsewhere and being an active part of the community,” Kokonas said. “I do not shower in the morning anymore. I shower at four in the afternoon because I’m going to get dirty.”
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Kokonas’s first trip to Napa Valley was with Dagmara in the mid-1990s, and it became “the only place we came back to over and over again.” Their visits got progressively longer; they’d joke about buying land and would haphazardly stop in front of the real estate office to peruse properties. Eventually, Kokonas created Google Alerts for new listings in Napa Valley and Sonoma County, which he tracked in a spreadsheet.
In 2018 or 2019, Kokonas looked at a property in Calistoga. It had a pond surrounded by willow trees, a fruit tree orchard, an olive grove and a vineyard. “It’s an old school wine estate, where people live and work,” he said. But there was “a lot of deferred maintenance,” and the house “was way too big.”
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A few years later, shortly after he’d sold and left Tock, Kokonas was back in Napa Valley, and the Calistoga property was still on the market. Dagmara accused him of being “ATNO” — all talk, no action — “the ultimate insult in our house.” So five years after he first looked at the land, he called the listing agent and made a “super low-ball bid” that was “still a lot of money.”
The offer was accepted in just 15 minutes. Three years later, Kokonas is preparing to launch Tangle Ranch with a rosé of Cabernet Franc made “in a Bandol-style” — referring to the prestigious, full-bodied rosé from Provence — a co-fermented blend of Merlot and Petit Sirah and a more classic red blend. He’s also planting Chenin Blanc and Sauvignon Blanc on the estate, and creating a secondary, experimental label, Vonn and Donne, for wines that are “counter to everything being done in Napa.”
The initial release of wines will be sold for $80 and under, as Kokonas feels that the enormous jump in the cost of tastings and wines is one major factor in the industry’s current woes. He even takes some of the responsibility for this, suggesting that Tock, which had roughly 1,000 wineries on its platform across the U.S. — it recently began the process of merging into Resy, also owned by American Express — initiated some of the price changes. At first, wineries used Tock to create tiered pricing, ranging from free tastings for first-timers to higher-end experiences for those willing to pay. But when visitation started to dip, Kokonas said the “tiers started to go away,” tasting rooms were “charging everyone $80” and “the pricing kept going up.”
Kokonas said he has “an incredible amount of empathy and sympathy” for struggling grape growers, but he also isn’t fully buying into the idea of a wine crisis. “Maybe GLP-1s are hurting it. Maybe the younger generations aren’t tuned into alcohol or have other options. But if Gallo is down and Constellation is down and they’re ripping out 10,000 acres, so what? I don’t care,” he said, though some boutique producers have also been hit hard, forced to close or sell.
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“I have 44 acres and I’m going to tell our story and others should do the same,” Kokonas said. “People have been drinking wine for thousands of years. I don’t think the culture of wine is going to go away.”
Dining and Cooking