At the Palace Market, a sign has rested on a dwindling display of bottles since mid-summer: “THE PLEIADES CHAPTER CLOSES.” For decades, the cult wine label, which began in Bolinas as Thackrey and Co. and was rebranded as Pleiades Wine Company, drew a devoted global following. After a brief revival under new ownership, the winery is selling off its last stock.
The bottles have been moving quickly, said Brittany Hartwell, the market’s director of operations. “Customers want to grab the last bit of history for themselves,” she said. “Thackrey’s wines are a cornerstone of what makes this area known for its local bounty. It’s a shame they’ll be gone.”
The label’s founder, Sean Thackrey, was an art dealer and polymath who settled in Bolinas in the 1970s. On a lark, he fermented grapes growing along his fence line, an experiment that became Thackrey and Co. The winery quickly gained renown for its idiosyncratic bottlings named for constellations—Orion, Lyra, Andromeda, Sirius. But it was the Pleiades blend, named for the star cluster closest to Earth, that found the widest audience.
Mr. Thackrey lambasted the wine world’s obsession with single varietals and terroir. “It’s economic self-interest to attribute quality to geology rather than human intervention,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 2004. “Every cabinetmaker treasures his wood source. But there are plenty of bad cabinets made with good wood.”
With each Pleiades release, numbered with Roman numerals rather than vintages, Mr. Thackrey flouted winemaking orthodoxy—and built a cult following. At about $28 a bottle, Pleiades was the most democratic of his wines, a blend of grapes and vintages chosen simply because he liked how they tasted. A typical bottling might combine sangiovese, zinfandel, pinot noir, mourvèdre and viognier, yielding earthy undertones overlaid with notes of dark fruit and dried cherry, leather and game.
“It came onto the market at a time when everyone else was striving for varietal purity,” said Lawrence Sander, who for years sold Mr. Thackrey’s wines at the Palace Market and now buys for Mill Valley Market. “Sean inspired winemakers and drinkers to release their hangups about what was ‘varietally correct.’ Now you see so many winemakers approaching their craft in that way, but Sean blazed the trail.”
Mr. Thackrey’s eccentric methods became the stuff of legend. He mined medieval and classical viticulture texts, including Hesiod’s “Work and Days,” which advised resting freshly picked grapes in the shade for three days, a ritual he followed. His library of 740 works was sold just before his death in 2022 to buyers in Bordeaux for $2 million.
By the time Mr. Thackrey died, his production had long since outgrown Bolinas, shifting to a custom facility in Sonoma. His estate sold the brand and inventory to Richard Shell, a former publisher of a wine trade journal, who reconstituted it as Pleiades Wine Company alongside Thackrey’s protégé, Dustin Durfee. But disputes with the estate coupled with industry headwinds proved insurmountable. The company announced this summer that it would close, and it offered its remaining stock at a steep discount. Fewer than 800 cases remain.
Even at its peak, Pleiades remained a small operation, producing about 4,000 cases a year. But its influence was outsized. Both the Pleiades XXXII, the final batch, and Orion, a field blend from century-old vines in St. Helena’s Rossi Vineyard, have garnered cult status. A handful of 2019 bottles of the latter remain at Mill Valley Market, priced at $120.
The label’s closure comes amid an epochal downturn for the $55 billion California wine industry. Changing drinking habits, effects of climate change and competition from foreign government-subsidized imports have combined to create the harshest environment that wine grape growers have faced in years. Last year’s harvest was the lightest in two decades, down nearly a quarter from the year before.
“This closure is certainly not unique,” Mr. Sander said.