The history of Redmon Wines began in the early 1970s when the Redmon family moved to St. Helena to purchase and operate the iconic A&W restaurant on Main Street. For the next 35 years, the family members each took a turn working in the restaurant, cooking hamburgers and pouring the famous root beer.

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Lisa had a long history at the A&W and started her first job there at age 13 where she worked hard taking orders, preparing food, and helping the customers. St. Helena High School was located right across the street from the restaurant and when she started school there, her father Tom arranged that she could leave school half an hour early to run across the street and help work the lunch rush. She would finish up and then walk back to school, eating a burger on the way to her afternoon classes.

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Each day, Tom Redmon would work the front counter during lunch and became well acquainted with the locals. During those early years, he began to invest the profits from his restaurant into real estate. In such a small town of only 5,500 people, he soon developed a solid reputation for purchasing homes, apartments, and land. Restaurant customers would sometimes approach him with real estate opportunities which he would drive to see after work. One of these opportunities led him to purchase his first and only vineyard in the early 1980s, the 3 ½ acre vineyard in St. Helena that became the family’s Redmon Estate Vineyard.

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The Redmons were not considering entering the wine business at the time, so for years, Tom sold the grapes from their vineyard to local wineries. When Lisa returned to St. Helena as an adult, she thought she’d try her hand at producing wine and the rest is Redmon history!

 

Read more about Lisa’s jump into the wine business.