Gina Gallo-Boisset and Jean-Charles Boisset are no strangers to the concept of a dynasty, respectively hailing from two of Burgundy and California’s most prominent families. Yet with Flora Springs, their new joint project in Napa Valley, the duo are drawing on their shared family experiences to shape a legacy of their own; a personal project to one day pass to their daughters.
Jean-Charles was born and raised in the small Burgundy village of Vougeot, where his father, Jean-Claude, founded the family domaine in their home in 1961. “The winery was under my bedroom, which I shared with my sister for a while,” Jean-Charles explains. “So, we come, like many growers in Burgundy, straight from the terroir of Vougeot; this is why Pinot Noir and Chardonnay run in our blood.” The domaine, today based in Les Ursulines, is now under the care of Jean-Charles and his team, who work with some of Burgundy’s great vineyards. America has always interested Jean-Charles, though. His grandparent’s involvement with the French resistance had forged close ties with England and America, and a family holiday to America when Jean-Charles was 11, sparked a desire to one day split his time between the USA and France. “I’ve always wanted a balanced life between the Old World and what I’d call the American way of life: that dynamic, forward-thinking approach to how Americans build and shape their own lives,” Jean-Charles shares. “I’m deeply drawn to that American spirit of defining who you want to be and going for it, the American dream, if you like.” His first foray in California was purchasing De Loach in the Russian River Valley in 2003, and soon he came to call California his second home.
Despite being born and raised in California, Gina and Jean-Charles met in Bordeaux through a mutual friend who insisted they should meet. Their meeting brought together two people with a shared connection to California and its winemaking heritage. Gina’s family has deep roots in Californian wine, dating back to the post-Prohibition era, when her grandfather played a crucial role in reviving the region’s viticulture and winemaking traditions. Today the family still owns some of California’s great, pre-prohibition vineyards including Monte Rosso in the Moon Mountain AVA (fellow Liberty Wine producer Far Mountain makes wine from these centennial vines). Gina, like Jean-Charles, grew up amongst the vines and in the family winery. She originally joined the business in a sales role but soon realised her true passion lay in the vineyards and winery, so she went to UC Davis to study winemaking. “I knew the farming side; I loved the land, the dirt, but I wanted to understand the science: how grapes become juice, and juice becomes something so complex,” she explains.
After graduating, Gina's grandfather suggested she join Gallo’s experimental team known as the ‘pilot plant’, where she spent a significant amount of time comparing rootstocks from across Northern California and the Central Coast, with, as Gina explains, the intention of “controlling every variable so you could isolate the effect of soil type, or yeast, or extraction method.” From there she would go on to help establish her family’s winemaking project in Sonoma, where she says she truly fell in love with the idea of expressing a sense of place through wine.
When Gina and Jean-Charles met, they bonded over their family histories and dynamics, and their joint love of learning and innovation. This leads us to Flora Springs, the Napa Valley winery they decided to purchase and build a joint family history with, independently of their respective family projects. Gina admits that at Gallo, everyone has their role and it’s hard to cross departments and juggle, for example, winemaking and marketing. You would do one or the other. Jean-Charles set up his own side businesses to explore his creative interests for similar reasons. With Flora Springs, they don’t have the same boundaries.
Gina and Jean-Charles purchased Flora Springs in 2024 to build on the family legacy with their twin daughters, who grew up among the vineyards of Napa. The estate was originally founded in 1978 by the Komes family and has an excellent reputation. “Flora Springs was one of the benchmark Napa Cabernets we [Gallo] studied in the 1990s when building our family winery’s own Cabernet program,” Gina shares, “alongside names like Joseph Phelps, Opus One and Dunn.” The Komes family built an impressive stable of vineyards across nine AVAs, with Rutherford, St. Helena and Oakville in the Napa Valley forming the core holdings. “The Rutherford Hillside is one we’re particularly excited about,” explains Gina, “the Sauvignon Blanc on the valley floor is fantastic, and the Cabernet, even close to the river, is really intriguing.”
It’s still early days for the project with Gina and Jean-Charles at the helm, but already Gina has been able to get back to winemaking and viticulture roots, applying a lot of the lessons learned at her family winery to this new chapter of Flora Springs. Jean-Charles was conscious that getting back to these roots was important for Gina in this project. He explains, “What Gina needed was to go back to the source, to reconnect with the vine, get her hands dirty again, which she loves to do. Flora Springs lets her reconnect with the reason she got into wine in the first place.”
We currently have four of Gina’s Flora Springs wines in our Portfolio. For the reds, the Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon blends Oakville, Rutherford and St. Helena fruit and the ‘Trilogy’ blends Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot from these same three AVAs. For the whites, the Sauvignon Blanc hails from Yountville, while the ‘Soliloquy’ blends Sauvignon Blanc, Malvasia and Vermentino from the ‘Crossroad Ranch’ vineyard in Oakville.
We look forward to seeing how Flora Springs continues to develop under Gina and Jean-Charles’s guidance.