Lee, Theodora
c. 1962-present · Contribution: 2001-present
Founded Theopolis Vineyards in 2003 in Mendocino County's Yorkville Highlands while continuing a full-time career as a senior trial lawyer, becoming one of the few Black women to both own and personally make wine in the United States
Portraits are AI-generated interpretations, not photographs.
Impact on the world
Known in the wine world as “Theo-patra, Queen of the Vineyards,” Lee combined a farming childhood on her family's Texas cattle ranch with a career as a senior trial lawyer to become a vintner, planting Petite Sirah on 20 acres she purchased in 2001 after being unable to afford land in Napa or Sonoma; her grapes earned a 94-96-point rating from critic Robert Parker on their first 2006 harvest, and after a 2012 contract dispute forced her to have her own fruit custom-crushed, she began bottling Theopolis Vineyards wine under her own label, which has since won Wine Enthusiast's highest-ever rating for a Petite Sirah (96 points, 2018 vintage) and multiple gold and double-gold medals at the San Francisco Chronicle and San Francisco International wine competitions. She established the Theopolis Vineyards Diversity Fund at UC Davis's Department of Viticulture and Enology to fund scholarships for women of color entering the wine industry, and was a 2021 Wine Enthusiast Wine Star “Person of the Year” nominee.
Life & background
Born in Texas to Dr. Theodore R. Lee Jr. and Dorothy Evans Lee, and granddaughter of a Texas sharecropper, Lee grew up on her father's cattle ranch in Ellis County, learning to drive a tractor at age eight and developing what she describes as a lifelong love of land and farming; she graduated from Spelman College, where she sang in the Glee Club at Lincoln Center, and earned her JD from the University of Texas School of Law in 1987 after a stint as a U.S. Senate intern for Senator Sam Nunn. She moved to San Francisco in 1987 to practice employment law, where exposure to vineyard-owning law-firm mentors sparked an interest in wine; she took viticulture and enology classes at UC Davis before purchasing 20 acres of former sheep land in 2001 and planting her vineyard in 2003, naming it Theopolis after the Greek name she adopted pledging Delta Sigma Theta sorority. She continues to practice as a senior partner and trial lawyer at Littler Mendelson while running the vineyard, and serves on the boards of the San Francisco YMCA, Bay Area Legal Aid, and the United Negro College Fund's San Francisco advisory board.
Sources
- Forbes; Theopolis Vineyards; UC Davis Department of Viticulture and Enology; The Press Democrat; Essence
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