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Miller Family, CAWG’s 2025 Grower of the Year, Plan Their Vineyards for the Next Generation

California minimum wage was $9 an hour in 2015. Now it is $16.

Marshall Miller said his company, The Thornhill Companies of Santa Barbara County, has always paid above minimum wage. But if it continues to double every decade, Miller foresees a time when his company will not be able to afford hand pruning.

However, pruning machines that are good enough for premium wines haven’t yet been invented. But Miller believes they will be, and his family is redesigning and replanting some of their vineyards to be ready for the future.

“We think we’re at a real inflection point in the vineyard business in California,” Marshall told Grape & Wine. “We’ve seen a lot of farming by hand. We do not believe our kids’ generation will be farming this way. There’s going to be a lot more mechanization. Our goal right now is to put in the investment and planning in what grape growing looks like going forward. The tools we use now, if you’re using it for mechanical farming, they’re clumsy. I like to compare them to smart phones before the iPhone. We don’t have the iPhone yet. But it’s coming.”

The Miller family grows winegrapes in Santa Barbara County on over 1,500 acres of land.

The Miller family, fifth-generation growers, was recently named 2025 Grower of the Year by the California Association of Winegrape Growers (CAWG). Marshall had advance notice (about a minute). He is on the CAWG board, and when he showed up for the meeting, he learned the award was on the agenda.

“I was trying to play it cool,” Marshall said. “The people who vote on it are all growers we respect. It’s one thing to be recognized by the consumer. Being recognized by a group of people who know what they’re talking about is special.”

“It does feel good,” Nicholas Miller told Grape & Wine. “You do need to have good news in times like this. When you get a huge affirmation like this, it raises the tide of your whole organization. This is more meaningful than accolades and scores. We believe in CAWG. It’s a pretty big landscape to pick just one grower. Kind of a weird year to be it. We’re going to be celebrating at Unified while everybody is talking about Armageddon.”

The Miller family engages in a unique business strategy by tearing out grapevines on parts of their property and leasing those lands to growers of annual crops. Grapes eventually go back in the ground, allowing for less monocropping and better soil health.

Unique Operation
Nicholas and Marshall divide up responsibilities, with Marshall serving as Chief Operating Officer and Nicholas serving as Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Marketing Officer. Their father, Stephen Miller, is Chief Executive Officer. They farm 1900 acres in Santa Barbara County, 1500 of which are winegrapes. They also farm avocados and lemons and have since long before their parents planted winegrapes in 1973.

“I’ve been working with them for a long time,” said Bob Lindquist, founder of Qupé and now owner of Lindquist Family Vineyards. “My history with the Millers goes back to 1985 when Bob Miller approached me about grafting some of their vineyard over to Syrah. I said, ‘You’re probably in too cool a site.’ This was 1985. We didn’t have a lot of information about cool-climate Syrah. And he said, ‘We have Merlot and Cabernet out in our vineyard, and they ripen every year.’ And I said, ‘But have you tasted them? They’re terrible.’ He laughed. He invited me out to Bien Nacido and asked me what blocks could be grafted over to Syrah. We settled on a Riesling block that had been planted in 1973. In 1986, 7 acres were grafted over to Syrah. First crop was 1987. I’ve been making Syrah from it ever since.”

In fact, the Millers’ main marketing point for their grapes has been the quality of winemakers who work with them. They are in a position at their main Bien Nacido Vineyard of choosing their clients and have chosen well enough that the vineyard, unusually, is better known than some of the wineries that make wine from it. You can also say that about To Kalon in Napa but not many other California vineyards.

“We need to be a little bit style agnostic ourselves,” Marshall said. “For Russell From or Paul Lato who want a very rich Syrah, we are doing that, whereas for Lane Tanner who wants a very light Pinot Noir, we are doing that. In our minds, this is good customer service, to understand what the winemakers’ goals are and trying to help them make those goals.”

In addition to Bien Nacido Vineyard and Solomon Hills Vineyard in Santa Maria Valley, they own 1500-acre French Camp Vineyard in Paso Robles Highlands. It’s one of the largest certified organic vineyards in the state and allows them to sell to big wine brands, including Cupcake and Rex Goliath, that can’t afford their higher-priced Santa Maria Valley grapes.

Currently, they are doing something at Bien Nacido that other grape growers might want to consider: After tearing out grapevines on parts of their property, they are leasing those lands to growers of annual crops.

The Miller family is always looking forward and preparing for the next generation. “Our goal right now is to put in the investment and planning in what grape growing looks like going forward,” said Marshall Miller.

“Our family has really tried to stick to permanent crops,” Nicholas said. “It’s usually working with an annual grower. We want them to be able to sow the land, putting back nutrients. We’ve leased it to vegetable growers. We’ve had leafy greens. We’ve had flowers. That’s a fun one, when we get into the fields and we have gladiolas. Unlike regions like Napa that are fully planted to grapes, we really have that diversity in Santa Barbara County.”

Strawberries are by far the most valuable crop in Santa Barbara County at $775 million, worth nearly eight times as much as winegrapes, according to the county agricultural commissioner’s office. Flowers are second. Winegrapes, at $98 million, are just ahead of broccoli, cauliflower and two kinds of lettuce.

“This kind of diversity forced people in Santa Barbara County to plant grapes where they should be, up on the hillsides and the slopes,” Nicholas said. “Other farmers are happy to take that land for a short term. Leasing land is lower dollar value than winegrapes but it’s commercially viable.”

“There’s a broader protocol for us,” Marshall said. “Grapevines are a monocrop. When we can take what has been a block of grapes and farm it for something else for a period of time, it does really well for the soil health. That’s crop rotation on a generational basis. There are some plots on hillsides that are only good for grapes. But where possible, we are farming other things. We are going to put grapes back in, but with a learning dialectic.”

That said, reducing the need for labor is also a constant goal that leasing some land helps achieve. Marshall was inspired by a visit to a Porsche factory in Germany.

“They take great pride in Porsches being hand-assembled,” Marshall said. “But if you stand there and watch, an automated cart brings the part to the worker. The worker doesn’t have to move. They have thought about how to use hand labor where it has the most impact.”

Miller sees that analogy for pruning grapevines.

“We need to look at what are the capabilities of our staff,” Marshall said. “What are the things that can only be done by hand? If we can mechanize one pass at pruning, and then come back and clean that up by hand, there’s synergy there.”

The Miller family’s The Thornhill Companies include brands like Bien Nacido, Solomon Hills and more.

Everything Done Mindfully
The Millers have also been ruthless about replanting when their yield drops.

On the Central Coast, we’re in the price/value area. We need to overdeliver on the value,” Nicholas Miller said. “We have to redevelop when yields fall. If you’re an estate farmer, you can raise your bottle prices. In Napa, they can charge $300, $400 a bottle. It’s hard to get to $100 a bottle on the Central Coast. When you start getting vines that are producing plus or minus one ton an acre, it’s not commercially viable. What we don’t need in the industry right now is people holding onto unproductive and non-commercially viable vineyards. We really saw this as a leadership position we can take.”

The Millers plan to add a second drip line on all new vineyards. It will be their third irrigation system, after the first drip line and the overhead sprinklers that are mainly used for frost control. The reason is the prevalence of viruses like leafroll has led growers to pull out a single underperforming grapevine from a row much more often than a generation ago.

“No one wants this; everyone wants the vines in a vineyard to be on the same schedule,” Marshall said. “But roguing has become an important part of farming. At any given time, 2% to 3% of the vineyard will be new vines that need to be farmed very differently.”

By having a second drip line, the Millers can turn on irrigation (and fertigation) just for new vines.

“In the past, what you would do is run a water truck around and give more water to younger vines,” Marshall said. “But that’s a labor challenge for the next 20 to 30 years.”

And the Millers, in their fifth generation already, are spending a lot of time thinking about the sixth.

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