Half Full Wine Company

Half Full Wine Company

3000-F Danville Blvd., #142, Alamo, CA 94507
halffullwine.com

Region: Northern California

Owner: Family Owned – Tim Harris & Antonia Rozakis, Roger & Jennifer Billeci, Demetrius & Tina Palavos

Winemaker: Tim Harris & Edward Cholakian

About: Half Full Wine Co. started in a garage, where we spent more than a decade learning by doing. We made it official in 2023, but kept the same curiosity. Today, we roam Northern California looking for vineyards, varieties, and ideas worth chasing. Our wines are small-lot, single-vineyard and tied to one vintage. No formulas. No reruns. One vineyard. One vintage. One chance to get it right. That model gives us permission to keep exploring. Albariño and Chenin Blanc from Clarksburg; Grenache from Amador; Cabernet Franc from the Sierra Foothills; and now experiments with Chenin Blanc Pét-Nat and partial-carbonic Valdiguié. We don’t want to make the same wines forever. We want to keep discovering what California can do.

What is your favorite undiscovered grape? Grenache. We sometimes think of it as a more rustic cousin to Pinot Noir. It can be delicate and aromatic, earthy and savory, or surprisingly serious. It can make a beautiful rosé, a bright lighter red or something with real structure. And it has a way of showing where it was grown without needing much makeup. Mostly, we like that we haven’t figured it all out yet. Every time we work with Grenache, there seems to be another direction worth exploring.

What was your first experience with an undiscovered grape? It’s hard for us to point to one grape or one bottle. The discovery itself has always been the part of wine that hooked us. A bottle from somewhere you’ve never been. A grape you’ve never heard of. Traveling somewhere and tasting something that makes perfect sense in that place. Then coming home and wondering what else is out there—and what some of those ideas might look like in California. That curiosity eventually became the model for Half Full. Instead of building a lineup and repeating it every vintage, we gave ourselves permission to keep looking. New vineyards. New grapes. New techniques. New favorites. The adventure of a new wine is still the part that fascinates us most.

What do you love most about the undiscovered grapes? There is always something else to try. That’s what we love about wine in general. You can spend a lifetime exploring it and still barely scratch the surface. Different grapes. Different regions. Different producers. Different styles. And great examples exist in all of them. We love to travel. We love ordering the bottle we don’t recognize. We love tasting someone else’s experiment and having it change the way we think about our own. And we bring that same curiosity into the cellar. Right now, that means exploring Chenin Blanc in a completely different style and experimenting with partial-carbonic Valdiguié. Next year, who knows. There is too much good wine in the world to stop exploring.