Maître de Chai (May-TRUH de Shay) translates to keeper of the cellar, or the person responsible for the development and aging of wine. By extension, the humble cellar master is the person responsible for the management of the winery.
Established in 2012, Maître de Chai is the personal project of Marty Winters and Alex Pitts. Together we look to make wines of high quality in a way that best showcases the sense of place where the grapes are grown and the personality of the vineyard. From the ground to the bottle, the character of the wine is the focus of our endeavor. We source grapes from unique and distinct single vineyards that are impeccably farmed here in California.
As our name implies, we care for the wines in the cellar. We defer to nature, limiting our intervention. We taste and we wait, allowing the wines to develop and speak for the places in which they are rooted.
Our story
Alex Pitts
Alex started working in restaurants in Phoenix, AZ as soon as he turned 16. He moved to San Francisco in 2008, working as a chef at Nopalito, Aqua, Cav Wine Bar, Siros, Cyrus, and The French Laundry. In 2012, he left the kitchen and transitioned to wine production with an internship at Scholium Project. He worked with Abe for years as his Assistant Winemaker, building some of the early wines of MDC on the side.
He enjoys listening to historical audiobooks, flying airplanes, hand-shaping pasta around a table, curating situationally specific playlists, and dimming the lighting in public and private dining spaces.
Stephanie Pitts
Stephanie… did not aspire to be a food & wine person or a hospitality person (barring a brief stint as a server at Famous Dave’s BBQ in Tucson in college). She moved to California to be a management consultant at Deloitte, went to business school at Berkeley-Haas with a stopover at Microsoft, and landed at a fintech startup in Oakland called Marqeta where she is a product manager. She runs much of the back-end MDC infrastructure, like this website, and puts her hands & feet in most of the fermentations each harvest.
She bakes elaborate treats, overuses pivot tables to solve all math-adjacent problems, peer pressures the rest of the group into booking travel, and enforces hydration standards.
Marty Winters
Marty started his cooking career at the Spruce outlet in Park City while attending college at the University of Utah. In 2010, he packed his car and headed further West to the Bay Area, joining the kitchen team at Cyrus, and spending time consulting at Quince. He pursued a winemaking/viticultural apprenticeship with Leo Hansen at Stuhlmuller/Leo Steen Wines in 2011, which prompted a shift to the front of the house in Sommelier roles at Addison Restaurant, in San Diego, and The Restaurant at Meadowood in Saint Helena, CA. In 2016 he was the Harvest intern at Kongsgaard Winery and in 2017 was the opening Estate Director of Ashes & Diamonds before leaving to run MDC full time.
Marty grew up in Maryland, and believes blue crab is superior to Dungeness. In his free time, he enjoys watching Premier League soccer (football).
Jessica Force-Winters
Jessica was born and raised in the great state of California and left briefly to attend the University of Oregon. She studied English, which pushed her towards a career in marketing and communications. She tailored her focus toward her passions of hospitality & wine by working with Robert Mondavi, Scribe Winery and The Restaurant at Meadowood before branching off as a brand consultant. She is the creative driver behind the MDC brand, and during her day job, Jessica provides brand and marketing services to a variety of wine and hospitality clients.
Jessica loves poetry, floral design, ordering the Americano cocktail (and retracting the order when the bar does not know how to make it and instead serves coffee), and taste testing pizza dough variations.
THE LABEL
The illustrative component of the Maître de Chai labels originated from Emmett Rixford's 1883 book The Wine Press and the Cellar. This book was one of the first guides to winemaking rather than grape growing.
Rixford was a San Francisco attorney who planted his 40-acre La Questa Vineyard in the Santa Cruz mountains near Woodside in 1884. In 1915, his cabernet won the Gold Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Today, one acre of his original vineyard remains within the 17-acre Woodside Vineyards.
Lady Liberty, of statue fame but based on the Roman goddess Libertas, stands next to an American flag shield. She holds a bottle of uncorked bubbles. The bear, a grizzly, rests against a barrel. While some versions of the California "bear flag" flew before this image, it predates the state's adoption of the flag in 1911. The bear on the state flag is based on Monarch, the famed "last wild grizzly" captured at the request of W.R. Hearst to be displayed in Golden Gate Park in 1889.
The boxes at their feet initially signaled Pineau, Riesling, Zinfandel, and Mission. Our labels now include a tiny nod to the grape in our bottles, including chardonnay, Chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, zinfandel, and cabernet sauvignon. Our friends at Gatto Design helped us refine the original image for our labels.