NAPA: Most wine dinners seat one winery at the table. The one Hestan Napa announced on Oct. 20 seats six, and every seat belongs to a woman. Six wineries from across Northern California, every one of them women-owned or women-led, do the pouring at Hidden Jewels, the six-course dinner Hestan Napa is hosting with Women for WineSense on Thursday, Nov. 12 at 5 p.m. in downtown Napa. Each of the six independent producers on the bill will be in the room, pouring and talking, while Executive Chef Mark Dommen's kitchen works through a menu built for their wines.
The evening opens standing up, with a reception pour of sparkling wine from Dot Wine and a Pinot Gris from Bishop Forbes Wine, before guests sit down to the six courses. The producers themselves introduce their wines as the night goes on, which is the design of the thing: the organizers are selling discovery as much as dinner, a roomful of drinkers meeting makers most of them will not have heard of, in the makers' own words.
Six courses, six producers
Dommen's menu runs from the sea to the cheese course. It opens with hamachi tartare with fennel, green apple, and yuzu kosho, paired with Art Nouveau Wine's 2025 Semillon and Sauvignon Blanc reserve blend, and moves to ember roasted beets with petite Basque cheese, hazelnuts, and aged balsamic, paired with Post & Vine's 2022 Mule Plane Vineyard Carignane. Duck agnolotti dal plin with beech mushrooms takes Dot Wine's 2023 Lolita Vineyard Pinot Noir, and grilled swordfish with pork belly, red cabbage, and green peppercorn jus takes Lost Valley Wines' 2024 Cabernet Sauvignon.
bring these winemakers and their stories to the table
The last two courses stay with red wine and then leave it. Braised beef cheeks with turnip, pearl onion, and mustard seed are paired with Art Nouveau's 2021 Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon, the producer's second wine of the night, and the dinner closes with a Point Reyes Basque blue cheesecake with local honey, paired with Ana Diogo-Draper Wines' Amador Doce + Forte. The six featured wineries are Bishop Forbes Wine, Art Nouveau Wine, Dot Wine, Post & Vine, Lost Valley Wines, and Ana Diogo-Draper Wines.
A chapter's own circle
The bill is not a casting call. Three of the six names were listed to pour this summer at the Women for WineSense Napa-Sonoma chapter's own grand tasting, held July 9 at Napa Valley College, where the program named Julie Lumgair of Art Nouveau Wines, Debra Becker Lamb of Lost Valley Wines, and Ana Diogo-Draper among the featured winemakers. Hidden Jewels reads as that chapter picking up its own circle and giving it a dining room, a chef, and a ticket price.
"At Hestan Napa, we're excited to introduce our guests to a group of talented women who are producing distinctive wines across Northern California," said Randy Collins, the restaurant's general manager. "This partnership with Women for WineSense is an opportunity to bring these winemakers and their stories to the table, alongside Chef Dommen's cuisine, for an evening of great food, wine and conversation."
The room, and the fine print
Hestan Napa is a new room by valley standards. It opened in November 2025 behind the Archer Hotel, at 1300 First Street, as restaurant, wine bar, and cookware boutique in one, built by Stanley and Helen Cheng, the couple behind Meyer Corporation. Dommen, a longtime Napa Valley resident, came to it as chef and partner of San Francisco's One Market Restaurant, where the restaurant's own site notes he held a Michelin star from 2008 to 2012. Collins arrived from the girl & the fig. The restaurant serves Thursday through Monday.
Tickets for Nov. 12 are $195 per person, including tax and gratuity, with reservations through OpenTable, and guests must be 21 or older. Seating stops at 50. Anyone who misses the room gets a second chance at the wines: Hestan Napa says it will keep pouring the six producers' wines by the glass for a limited time after the dinner.
Women for WineSense gives the evening its frame. The organization was founded in Napa and Sonoma in 1990 and is now a national nonprofit of nearly 800 members in 12 chapters, devoted to wine education, professional development, and the connections between the people who make wine and the people who drink it. Its founding Napa-Sonoma chapter still runs the local programs. Hidden Jewels, in the organization's own framing, is visibility work: independent producers, most of them small, put in front of a downtown Napa dining room at the height of the fall season.
