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Our Family
Ted Hall
(see Ted's business biography)
Raised in a small farming community in western Pennsylvania, Ted was an active member of 4-H. He maintained an egg-laying poultry flock, exhibited Hampshire lambs, and learned to ride on his Welsh pony. He maintained his own vegetable garden and learned the fundamentals of organic gardening by working his parents' compost pile.
Ted attended high school in LaPorte, Texas, a small town near Houston, where he met his future wife, Laddie, before going off to college at Princeton.
In 1971, Ted made his first wine in partnership with two of his graduate school classmates at Stanford University. Using carignane and zinfandel grapes purchased from an longtime Italian grower in Gilroy, CA, they hand crafted the wine in a garage in nearby Santa Clara. Intrigued and inspired by the results of this first effort, Ted made wine as an amateur for 17 consecutive vintages. With that long experience revealing firsthand the results of good and bad winemaking practices, several of his wines won awards at amateur winemaking competitions in Napa and Sonoma counties. In 1980, Ted and his winemaking partner, Kim Winget, gained recognition for their winemaking prowess by being featured in the September issue of Sunset Magazine.
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By the late 1980s, while enjoying a successful career as a partner at the international management consulting firm of McKinsey & Company, Ted began actively looking for a place for his family to establish their own vineyard and winery.
Since acquiring the property in 1989, Ted and his family have slowly uncovered the rich history of Long Meadow Ranch. |
 Pictured in a recent Hall family photo are Laddie, Ted & Chris Hall (pictured left to right) |
Laddie Hall
Born in Ann Arbor, MI, Laddie spent most of her childhood in the small towns of Pasadena and LaPorte, near Houston, TX. Her only experience with agriculture and animal husbandry was, as she puts it, "I had a goldfish." Today Laddie is a Master Gardener.
Despite this lack of experience, Laddie has assumed a major role in the development of Long Meadow Ranch. A critic of Ted's winemaking for many years, Laddie helped shape the objectives for developing the vineyards and winery. She has proven an able and sensitive hand in raising the livestock on the Ranch. Always the optimist, she has provided the steady support necessary to pursue our ambitious development program.
Working with her sons in the early '90s, Laddie helped develop Long Meadow Ranch’s commercial organic vegetable garden. She carefully selected varieties of herbs and specialty lettuces that are well-suited to the site. She is now working closely with her son, Chris, in producing and marketing the vegetables and flowers produced from the ranch as well as LMR Rutherford Gardens. Laddie can be seen every Friday morning at the St. Helena Farmers Market where she sells Long Meadow Ranch’s eggs, beef, vegetable, and flowers from May through October.
An accomplished horsewoman on the many trails criss-crossing Long Meadow Ranch, Laddie served as the leader of the Horse Project for the Rutherford 4-H. Currently she is as a member of the Board of Directors and secretary of the St. Helena Farmers Market.
Chris Hall
From the very beginning, Chris has been a driving force in the development of the diversified farming activities at Long Meadow Ranch. With the establishment of his first egg-laying poultry flock in 1991, Chris began selling eggs to neighbors and friends. This venture was quickly augmented with the first production of vegetables from a garden he planted with his brother, Timothy. In the summer of 1991, Chris and Tim made their first appearance at the Napa Valley Farmers' Market in St. Helena, and Chris has been active in the business of the ranch ever since.
Now the national ambassador of Long Meadow Ranch’s portfolio of family-run businesses, Chris oversees the latest offering from our family: Long Meadow Ranch Winery & Farmstead, our sustainable food, wine and agricultural center located in St. Helena. Chris is also responsible for the wine program at Farmstead restaurant, which features Long Meadow Ranch’s wines as well as other domestic and international wines selected by Chris to complement the restaurant’s American farmhouse cooking.
As Long Meadow Ranch’s vice president of sales, Chris creates and executes sales programs directed at achieving the family's goals for serving the nation's top restaurants and consumers. In the Napa Valley, he provides a single, integrated point of contact for Long Meadow Ranch’s highly valued Napa Valley customers.
Chris frequently takes to the road, criss-crossing the country to attend trade tastings, host educational events about Long Meadow Ranch, and conduct special events including winemaker's dinners featuring our products. The original architect of Long Meadow Ranch’s organic fruit and vegetable programs, Chris today serves in an advisory role for the production at LMR Rutherford Gardens.
With an entrepreneurial drive (he had a dog walking business at ten) and a natural strength in leadership (he became an Eagle Scout like his father), the San Francisco native has served in a variety of roles across the full range of the family businesses, including production manager for LMR Rutherford Gardens, on-premise sales manager and, most recently, national sales manager.
A second-generation vintner dedicated to producing elegant, food-friendly artisan wines, Chris is the current president of NG: The Next Generation in Wine, a vintners association that counts among its members family winery and vineyard owners in the Napa Valley who are second generation or later.
Chris is a licensed Emergency Medical Technician and a member of the local Rutherford Volunteer Fire Department, having studied geology and fire science at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He lives on the ranch in the historic "Winery House," which was once the Hassenmeyer Winery with his Bernese mountain dog, Oliver.
Timothy Hall
As the energetic explorer of the meadows and woods, Timmy found many of the artifacts we have discovered on the Ranch. Whether he found an antler from a deer, a 100 year old redwood fence post, or an Indian arrowhead, Timmy helped us discover the special nature of the Ranch. In honor of the Wappo tribe that originally inhabited the area, Timmy even constructed a teepee in the middle of Long Meadow.
A partner with his brother, Chris, in the organic vegetable garden, he specialized in the tomatoes, green beans, and beets. With his trademark cowboy hat, Timmy charmed customers at the Napa Valley Farmers Market every Friday morning.
Also a member of the Rutherford 4-H, he raised lambs and poultry. After a difficult start in the early years of showing his sheep, in 1996 one of Timmy's lambs was the Reserve Grand Champion Crossbred Lamb at the Napa Town and Country Fair.
An excellent rider, Timmy won many awards at local horse shows. In 1995 he represented Napa County at the California State Fair in the western and trail classes. He qualified for the State Fair by achieving a rare perfect score in the highly competitive trail class while riding his 28 year old Shetland pony, Happy. In 1996, he was again the Napa County trail class champion.
Timmy died suddenly from a brain aneurysm on September 29, 1996. He was thirteen. Always present in our hearts, he remains a central part of our life at Long Meadow Ranch.
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