Most wineries begin in a vineyard. This one began in the back of a ballroom.
Jeff Cova and Noah McMahon met in 2001 in the fundraising business. Jeff went on to build Winspire, a company whose entire purpose is helping nonprofits raise more: trips to Napa, wine experiences, hundreds of other things people will raise a paddle for. Between them they have spent decades at the back of ballrooms, learning what moves a crowd, and why the number keeps climbing long after the bidding stops being about the item.
People sometimes forget the name on the bottle. They never forget the setting. The music that was playing. The light going down over the hills. Who was sitting across from them. A wedding, a first date, a long table in the middle of a vineyard. That is where the name came from.
By 2014 they wanted to make a wine worthy of those rooms. At Pigs & Pinot in Healdsburg, the benefit founded by Charlie Palmer, one winemaker walked off with nearly every award at the event. He was in his twenties. They found him afterward. Jesse Katz said yes.
Jesse learned the world’s vineyards from the passenger seat, traveling with his father, the photographer Andy Katz, through Bordeaux, Burgundy and Mendoza. He trained at Petrus, Screaming Eagle and Vina Cobos, and at twenty-six became the youngest head winemaker in the United States. He has since made more than thirty-five 100-point wines rated by five different critics. In 2025, Wine Enthusiast named him Winemaker of the Year.
The first wine was a 2015 Cabernet from SJ Ranch, an old-vine site at the top of Chalk Hill Road, next door to Verite, on chalky volcanic soil in the coldest corner of Alexander Valley. A drought year: tiny berries, extreme concentration. “My job,” Jesse says, “was to tame the beast.” It tied the highest score Wine Spectator had given an Alexander Valley Cabernet since 1982.
Noah gave a bottle to his friend Shep Gordon, who put it into Emeril Lagasse’s Carnivale du Vin in New Orleans. It sold for $350,000: the most expensive bottle of wine ever sold at auction, from a brand three years old.
Four years later, a single six-liter of 2019 Glass Slipper Vineyard Cabernet from Coombsville sold at the same event for $1 million. The first bottle of wine in history to bring seven figures, and more than a quarter of everything the Foundation raised that weekend.
Two world records in four years, both inside the first decade. There are estates that have been making wine for four hundred years and never set one.
Today the three of us bring three different things to the same table. Jesse makes the wine. Jeff built Winspire, which has helped nonprofits raise more than $110 million across 120,000 events. Noah runs Anonymous Philanthropy, which designs the giving of some of the country’s most significant families and foundations. Every year a portion of every vintage goes back into rooms like the one where this started. Our wines have raised millions of dollars, and the bottlings we build for causes that need a moment have carried the Los Angeles Lakers, the Navy SEAL Foundation, Tony Hawk, Ellen DeGeneres and dozens of names we will never mention.
The records get the headlines. What we are proud of is quieter: the causes funded, the programs kept open, the lives those nights changed.
You may not always remember the name on the bottle, but you’ll always remember the Setting.
All the Best,
