Hailey Trefethen President: A Third Generation Takes Napa

Before the title came cluster counts, polished glassware, and informal tours given by a child who already knew the rhythms of a working Napa estate. On March 24, 2026, Trefethen Family Vineyards appointed Hailey Trefethen President, placing the third generation of the family at the helm of the winery founded in 1968.¹

The handoff has real weight for anyone who follows Napa through land and lineage as much as through labels. Trefethen remains one of the valley’s pioneering family-owned estate wineries, and Hailey’s path inside it has moved through vineyard work, cellar life, guest hospitality, marketing, sustainability, and family stewardship. That range gives the new role a lived-in authority.

Hailey Trefethen’s Path to President

Family leadership now gathers several generations around the same table. Hailey’s brother, Lorenzo Trefethen, serves as Co-Chair of the Board and partners closely on marketing and trade initiatives, while John and Janet Trefethen continue as board members and longstanding ambassadors of the estate.

At a family-run winery, leadership has to keep more than one calendar in view. The vineyard moves by season. Hospitality unfolds one guest at a time. Generational stewardship takes decades. A President at an estate like Trefethen carries all three, balancing daily decisions with the patience required to protect a place over the long arc.

Hailey did not simply inherit proximity to the name. She began her formal career at the winery as a Vineyard Intern in 2004, returned after college in 2008, and progressed through roles across farming, production, hospitality, and marketing.³ Farming put her close to the vines. Production brought her into the cellar. Hospitality placed her in direct conversation with the people who come to understand the wines in context.

That internal fluency matters. A leader who has worked across the estate understands how vineyard choices, cellar work, guest experience, and public identity meet in the glass.

Hillspring Vineyard Before the Job Title

Hillspring Vineyard anchors Hailey’s earliest connection to Trefethen. She grew up at the family residence there, on the vineyard that produces HāLo Cabernet Sauvignon, with the land shaping her understanding of the estate long before a formal job title appeared.

As a child, she gave informal tours, polished glassware, worked behind the scenes, and assisted with cluster counts before harvest. Those tasks are modest on the surface, but they teach essential lessons: standards, service, observation, and the quiet arithmetic of the vineyard before picking begins.

Hillspring was not a distant backdrop in Hailey’s upbringing. It was the place where family life, vineyard life, and the craft of wine overlapped from the beginning.

In family-owned wine, those early attachments often shape the way a property speaks about itself. They influence how a team hosts, how it explains its land, and how it chooses to carry memory forward without turning it into museum glass.

From Vineyard Rows to the Front Office

A Vineyard Intern’s view is close to the ground: rows, weather, counts, and the tactile pace of the growing season. Hailey’s move from that starting point into broader operational roles gave her a practical education in how an estate winery holds together.

Production translates vineyard work into wine. Hospitality introduces that wine to guests. Marketing carries the estate’s identity beyond the property. When one leader has moved through those functions, broad claims become harder to make lightly; the work behind them has to hold.

The strongest estate experiences connect what is in the glass to the land, the people, and the decisions behind it. Hailey’s route through Trefethen gives her that connective tissue.

Her experience also joins agriculture with welcome. Napa’s most memorable visits are rarely about spectacle alone; they are about hearing a wine explained by someone who understands why the estate farms, makes, pours, and presents it as it does.

A Leadership Philosophy Built on Stewardship

Stewardship, collaboration, and long-term vision define Hailey’s leadership style. At Trefethen, those ideas are tied to visible work: environmental initiatives, community service, and care for the physical estate.

"I look forward to building on my family’s legacy with intention and care, ensuring that Trefethen continues to thrive for generations to come."²

Hailey Trefethen, President

“Intention and care” is the key phrase. It points away from restless reinvention and toward a slower, more demanding form of authority: know the estate, protect what gives it identity, and keep it vital for those who will inherit it next.

Beyond the property, Hailey has served on the board of Napa Valley Vintners, served as board chair of Napa Green, and remains an active member of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers Association. Her father, John Trefethen, served as the association’s first president.⁴

Those roles place her firmly within the wider civic life of Napa wine. Estate leadership is never only internal; it also means participating in the standards, relationships, and responsibilities that help define the valley.

Sustainability Work with Named Credentials

Hailey has led Trefethen’s environmental initiatives and played a key role in a series of formal sustainability achievements: the California Green Medal Environment Award, Napa Green Vineyard and Napa Green Winery certifications, Certified California Sustainable Vineyard and Winery status, and the International Award of Excellence in Sustainable Winegrowing.⁵

Those proper nouns matter. Sustainability can become vague when it floats free of farming practice and accountability. Named credentials give the work edges, placing Trefethen’s environmental commitments inside recognized frameworks rather than leaving them as tasting-room language.

For visitors, certifications may sit quietly behind the pleasure of a tasting. For collectors, they may live behind the label rather than on it. Yet they shape the character of an estate, especially one committed to farming for the future rather than merely showcasing the current vintage.

Hailey’s presidency brings that environmental record into sharper focus. At a Napa estate with deep family roots, sustainability reads most convincingly as an operating discipline, something built into decisions over time.

The modern Napa guest often arrives with thoughtful questions about how wineries farm and how they define responsibility. Trefethen now has a President whose career has already engaged those conversations from inside the estate.

The 2014 Earthquake and the Historic Winery

After the 2014 Napa earthquake, Hailey led the restoration of Trefethen’s historic winery, preserving one of Napa Valley’s most well-known landmarks.⁶ That responsibility adds a different register to her leadership: not only vines and wines, but architecture, memory, and place.

Buildings can seem secondary until you stand inside a historic winery and feel how much life gathers there. Families receive guests there. Bottles are opened there. A property’s sense of continuity often lives as much in timber, stone, and cellar air as it does in the vineyard rows.

Restoration after an earthquake demands patience and precision. It also asks a family to decide what must be carried forward. Hailey’s role in that work placed stewardship in tangible form, long before the President title made it official.

For a third-generation leader, that kind of responsibility is especially resonant. The task is not merely to inherit an established name, but to tend the structures, physical and cultural, that give the name meaning.

Family Governance, Napa Networks, and What Comes Next

Trefethen’s next chapter takes shape through family governance as well as individual leadership. With Hailey as President, Lorenzo working at board level and in market-facing initiatives, and John and Janet continuing as ambassadors, the estate keeps memory and forward motion in active conversation.

Continuity is a real currency in wine. Guests and collectors build trust through people as well as through vintages, and a family estate can carry context in ways that no technical sheet ever quite captures.

Trefethen is open daily from 10 am to 4:30 pm, with information available through the winery at 707.255.7700 and trefethen.com. The takeaway for visitors is simple: go taste the wines where they are made, and listen for how the next generation frames the land.

The immediate cue for collectors is not to chase novelty for its own sake. It is to watch how future releases and hospitality reflect Hailey’s record: work across the estate, a sustained environmental portfolio, community leadership, and a deep family connection to place.

Napa has a succession story here with soil under its fingernails and governance around the table. Under Hailey Trefethen’s leadership, the measure will be how deliberately Trefethen carries its estate-grown wines, sustainable farming, thoughtful winemaking, and gracious hospitality into the years ahead.