Kathleen Inman, owner and winemaker at Inman Family Winery, discovered wine in college while taking a wine appreciation class as an art history major at UC Santa Barbara. She was surprised to discover that most of the wines came from the place she'd grown up: Napa Valley. While still in college, she took a summer job at Napa Creek Winery, working in the tasting room and cellar. On her very first day, she met a young Englishman - and Burgundy fan - on holiday. They exchanged a few pleasantries. Three weeks later a letter appeared at the winery addressed to the owner. Inside was a note asking him to pass along a second, sealed letter to "his pretty blond assistant." Kathleen corresponded with Simon Inman for a year, then moved to England on an exchange program. She never left. She married Inman; and it seemed, for a long time, that she'd left her fascination with California winegrowing far behind. In England, she worked as a finance executive; her husband, as a solicitor. True, they visited Burgundy frequently, tasting, studying and learning about the wines of Burgundy. Then, in 1998, they pulled up stakes and moved to California to fulfill their dream of making premier Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris.

"I'd always enjoyed wines from Burgundy. When I first started drinking wine, it was Pinot Noirs and Gamays that I was attracted to. Living in England, we had access to a lot of great French Pinot Noirs. In fact, my husband Simon, between school and university, actually worked in Nuits-Saint-Georges for a negociant, who now owns several grand cru vineyards. So when we decided to make wine, we thought, 'Well, if no one buys it, at least we'll be making something we really love - in case we have to drink it all ourselves.'"

Once in California, Kathleen began taking classes at UC Davis. Eventually, they found a small farm at the corner of Piner and Olivet, west of Santa Rosa. Though located in the heart of the Russian River appellation, the property had no grapes on it, just long-ignored orchards and weeds. Kathleen spent a year choosing appropriate rootstock and clones for the soil; and in 2000, the Inmans planted 13,000 closely spaced vines of Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris.

Inman makes wines that are meant to be consumed with food. Her opulent Pinot Gris, with its lush floral nose and slate finish, is the perfect seafood wine. "I aim every year for the perfect oyster wine, but you never know what the weather will do, so sometimes I get the perfect scallop wine or the perfect crab wine." She is just about to bottle her first Pinot Noir. It's a restrained, feminine wine that combines red fruit flavors with a forest-floor earthiness. In fact, she picked the grapes early to insure that the grapes' herbal quality wouldn't be lost in over-ripeness. "A lot of winemakers, all they want is berry, berry, berry and no herbaceousness, but I think that earthiness is part of the varietal's character and complexity, part of what makes Pinot Noir interesting in the first place."

Eighty percent of Inman's customers are women, a fact she attributes to the feminine and food-friendly style of her wines and , surprisingly, to the screw-top closures she's used from the start. "I've had a lot of women tell me they like the screw tops," she says with a laugh. "Probably because you don't need a tool to open them."

The vineyard is farmed organically, and Inman uses worm castings and compost from five-star restaurants in San Francisco - some of which buy her wine. "It makes a really nice circle," she says. That circularity is what she enjoys about winemaking in general. "I like doing different things in different seasons," she says. "It just feels right."