The history of Chateau Souverain begins with their founder, J. Leland Stewart, who was born in California in 1905. Stewart’s mother came from the Leland family (founders of Stanford University), while his father was a businessman from Scotland. A man of the people, J. Leland was never comfortable with the pretension of the name ‘Leland’ and all that came with it. So he simply called himself Lee.

Lee was a trendsetter, opting to grow grapes rather than the predominant crop of the day—prunes. He became an advocate of clean winemaking practices. He was among the first in California to concentrate on single-varietal, estate wines; introducing Petit Sirah as a varietal, and taking a page from the French by insisting that Chardonnay be fermented in oak rather than stainless steel. Lee shared his knowledge with the small winemaking community in Napa that informed such esteemed contemporaries as the Mondavi Brothers, Jack Davies of Schramsberg, Brother Timothy of Christian Brothers Winery and André Tchelistcheff at Beaulieu.

In the years that followed, Lee Stewart used innovation, a commitment to precision and craftsmanship and his natural gift for winemaking to establish Chateau Souverain as one of the great California wineries. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, Lee’s Cabernet Sauvignon helped to estab­lish Napa Valley as the cradle for the varietal outside of France.