Hélène Seillan was nine years old when her family moved to Sonoma County from Bordeaux, France in 1996. Her father, Pierre Seillan, had spent the past two decades making wine in Bordeaux—and the Loire Valley before that—yet, through an early viticulture exchange program between the United States and France in 1974, he first cut his teeth working as an intern in a vineyard in Temecula, Calif.

The extreme heat of Southern California doesn’t lend itself to exceptional winemaking, so while the general experience of farming and tending to the vines for six months in Temecula was invaluable for the young Frenchman, Pierre didn’t yearn to immediately revisit the West Coast after his initial introduction.

What did lure Pierre back to the United States—and California in particular—was a meeting with the late Jess Jackson, a visionary winemaker who owned hectares upon hectares of great vineyards all throughout Californian wine country and who gave the French winemaker carte blanche to choose where he wanted to work and what he wanted to do.

“He finally met somebody who had a vision,” Hélène recalls, speaking of her father’s introduction to Jackson. “And when he saw his [Jackson’s] portfolio of vineyards, that’s when my dad realized the potential. I don’t think anybody anywhere in the world has access to so many amazing vineyard sites.

“It took just a couple of days for them to completely spark,” she continues. “My dad didn’t speak good English and Jess didn’t speak much French, but somehow they completely understood each other.”

In that moment, Vérité was born.

With vineyard sites located all over Sonoma County—along the coast, up in the hills, and down in the valleys—Pierre suddenly had the opportunity to create wines in a manner that Bordeaux’s winemaking regulations would never allow. As Hélène explains, there are 56 appellations that grow grapes in Bordeaux, but strict winemaking parameters prevent wines made from those various appellations to be blended together.

According to Hélène, after years of making wines for various Bordeaux estates—always adhering to those rigid standards—her father simply grew bored. So much so that he would often take bottles from each of those estates where he worked and he would blend them in private, just to experiment. The resulting blends were often spectacular, which only exacerbated Pierre’s frustrations.

“Tasting wine I’d done a lot of, but not physically working with my hands. I learned how to drive a tractor. I was mowing, I was hedging. I did it all, and it was great.”

Naturally, when he was offered a chance to create a winery in a spectacular environment with so many diverse regions and unique terroirs—all of which could legally be blended together—Pierre jumped at the opportunity. The thrill of a new challenge and the prospect of creating Bordeaux-style wines in California filled him with enthusiasm and excitement. His daughter, on the other hand, felt differently.

“Moving across the world to a new continent, it felt like they cut my roots,” she says. “I had no more sense of place.”

Hélène spent her childhood learning the art of winemaking, if only by watching her father. “It’s been a life education around wine,” she says. “I saw him going to harvest and working day and night. I would see the atmosphere in the cellars. I was invited to the harvest parties, so I got to grow up in it. I got to see all the hard work that goes into making a bottle of wine. It’s a life, it’s not a job. It’s not just about winemaking or just about viticulture. It’s a whole lifestyle.”

By the time she had reached her teenage years, however, Hélène wanted to forge her own path. Like her father, she embraced a desire to create, but as she remembers, “in my house growing up, all I heard about was wine, wine, wine, wine, wine, so I wanted to do something different.” She contemplated art school in San Francisco or culinary school, but around the time that she was finishing her senior year of high school, her father and the Jackson family acquired Château Lassègue in Saint-Émilion.

Rather than pursue a college education in a foreign trade, Hélène decided that she would return to France and work at Château Lassègue—at least for a year. So, she packed her bags after graduation and moved back to Bordeaux to work a full season at the winery.

It wasn’t an easy transition. For starters, she was the boss’s daughter, so that made it more difficult to assimilate with the rest of the crew working the vineyards. She was also a young, 18-year-old, so she had to work incredibly hard to gain her coworkers’ respect. But in the process—especially taking on all aspects of vineyard management and winemaking—she discovered a passion for the family trade.

“Tasting wine I’d done a lot of,” she says, “but not physically working with my hands. I learned how to drive a tractor. I was mowing, I was hedging. I did it all, and it was great.”

Following her season in Saint-Émilion, Hélène returned to Sonoma, but for the next seven years, she split her time between Vérité and Château Lassègue, working both harvests. Today, she holds the position as assistant winemaker at Vérité, working exclusively alongside her father to craft Bordeaux-style wines that showcase and celebrate the amazing fruit grown across all of Sonoma County.

“We are from Bordeaux, so we understand that balance and that elegance from Bordeaux wines. That’s our education,” she says. “But we’re not trying to make a copy of Bordeaux. We’re just trying to make something amazing in Sonoma.

“The freedom that we have to do this is what makes Vérité so special and so unique,” she continues. “But also the fact that we don’t buy any fruit from anywhere—it’s all family owned. We control everything that we put in the tanks, inside the wines, and we farm exactly how we need to, to adapt to different vintages.”

Vérité’s three wines—La Muse, La Joie, and Le Désir—each evolve from vintage to vintage based on the harvest. There’s no set recipe that Pierre or Hélène adhere to every year. Furthermore, the versatility that those three labels can provide is enhanced by the fact that Vérité relies on several grape varieties grown across four sub-appellations, which also include smaller plots or vineyards—Pierre has labeled these micro-crus—which bring their own energy and signature of that particular soil. “It’s an amazing place where we have the liberty to blend anything that we want in Sonoma,” Hélène says. “That’s the idea here at Vérité. That’s what we do.”

She’s not one to talk up her own abilities, but Hélène does reluctantly acknowledge that she has advanced the winemaking operation at Vérité, most notably by bringing a palate to the blending process that’s as strong—perhaps even stronger—than her father’s. Still, she’s quick to deflect much of the praise and chooses to focus more on her father and his talents. “I spend all my time following him around, being with him. I observe him all the time, and it’s insane how connected he is to nature,” she says. “He literally goes outside and smells trees and the intensity of leaves just to understand the terroir. It’s not just about the dirt, it’s about how the trees grow, the intensity in the leaves. He pays attention to nature. He’s a farmer; it’s his instinct. He’s got a sixth sense.”

The prospect of Hélène someday sliding into her father’s role and becoming Vérité’s head winemaker has entered her mind, though Hélène insists that she’s in no hurry to take the reins from her dad. When that day comes, however, she hopes the transition is one that is seamless, especially as it relates to the liquid that goes into each one of the winery’s bottles.  “My goal is for nobody to be able to tell the difference between my winemaking and his winemaking,” she declares. “Our [individual] styles don’t matter. It’s the Sonoma terroir and the Vérité signature that goes first. I want the wine to speak for itself, and I want it to be from Sonoma.”

Such a dedication to the region and her passion to bottle an authentic sense of place says a lot about how far Hélène has come, especially as it relates to the significance that Sonoma now has in her life. “I feel at home here,” she says. “Sonoma now is my home. And with Vérité, after 25 years, it’s a real legacy. It’s something that’s going to be here for a very long time, hopefully for generations. That’s what’s most exciting. It’s being part of that. Writing the history of Sonoma, writing something new for Sonoma, and continuing that legacy for Jess Jackson and for his family.”