Mark Hanson had spent more than five years planning, permitting and building Bricoleur Vineyards when the opening date finally landed: May 2020.
Then March happened, and the 39-acre Windsor estate he runs with his wife Elizabeth and daughter Sarah Citron had no visitors to open to.
The family had designed the property around hosting. Olive groves, rose gardens, bocce courts, and a courtyard built for 150 to 200-person charity dinners with chef Shane McAnelly in the kitchen. The first of those dinners on the calendar was Wishes on the Vine, a June fundraiser for Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area, an organization the Hansons had supported for more than two decades. The pandemic cancelled all of it.
Make-A-Wish was in a tighter spot. The chapter had more than 100 children whose spring and summer travel wishes could not safely be granted, and in-person fundraising, the engine that pays for wishes, had stopped.
What Hanson did next gave the winery its name a second meaning. In French, a bricoleur is a craftsman who builds with whatever is at hand. With the gates shut, the Hansons and McAnelly started Quarantine Kitchen, a virtual cooking and wine-tasting series streamed from the estate. In May they invited Make-A-Wish Greater Bay Area CEO Betsy Biern to cook alongside McAnelly, a strozzapreti pasta paired with Bricoleur’s 2017 Zinfandel. The winery donated a share of the evening’s wine sales and added a matching gift. By the end of the night the event had raised more than $30,000, enough to fund three wishes.
Biern later credited the family’s creativity with keeping the chapter connected to its community at a point when nothing else could. Hanson’s own read on it was that three wishes was a start, not a finish.
The chapter came back in August for a second Quarantine Kitchen, this time a late-summer menu of roasted salmon, creamed corn and a tomato and cucumber salad, poured with Bricoleur’s estate Russian River Valley rosé of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.
Hanson has said that his family’s attachment to the Make-A-Wish mission, helping children and families through the hardest stretches of their lives, spread through the winery’s staff as the partnership grew. Charity events were part of the plan for Bricoleur from the beginning, with food and wine pairings, farm-to-table dinners and auctions meant to raise money for causes the family cares about, and Make-A-Wish at the top of that list.
Before the winery, Hanson spent more than 20 years in enterprise software, including senior roles at Siebel Systems and Visigenic, and later as a Managing Director at Genstar Capital, where he remains on the Strategic Advisory Board. A record of that board work is at markhanson.co. Bricoleur Vineyards opened for outdoor tastings by appointment later in 2020, and the family has said it intends to grow the Make-A-Wish partnership through both virtual events and, eventually, the in-person dinners the courtyard was built for.
