Curvature Wines
Curvature Wines marks a unique collaboration between two accomplished women, professional golf star Cristie Kerr and Pride Mountain Vineyard co-owner Suzanne Pride Bryan. Their mission is to make great wine while helping to raise awareness and funding for the fight against breast cancer.
Cristie Kerr’s route into winemaking was rather elliptical, born of a desire to do something positive after watching her mother, aunt and godmother all fight breast cancer. Before the genesis of Curvature, she founded Birdies for Breast Cancer in 2003, a not-for-profit organization raising money and awareness to fight the disease.
Cristie’s vision for Curvature developed from a strong desire to support other women and a deep love of wine. Naturally, she started her own wine venture to help raise funds for the cause. Having made friends with some highly esteemed vintners in the Napa Valley from her regular visits there throughout the 2000s, Cristie contacted Suzanne Pride Bryan with the idea of creating a collaborative wine project.
“In 2008 we went to meet with Pride Mountain Vineyards up on Spring Mountain in St. Helena. For the first 30 minutes of the conversation, Suzanne tried to talk me out of doing this. She said, ‘Why do you want to make a wine, it’s really expensive…’. I said: ‘Well, I want to make a really high-quality Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon, super small quantity, and… I want to give all the money away to breast cancer research’. It turns out Suzanne was actually being treated for breast cancer at the time. So, we hit it off and an hour later we were blending our first Curvature wine!”. That day in 2008, Curvature Wines was launched, an altruistic partnership between Cristie and Suzanne Pride Bryan of Pride Mountain Vineyards.
Made with the utmost care and attention by Cristie, Suzanne and Pride Mountain’s winemaker Sally Johnson, Curvature wines are certainly not your average ‘charity wine’. In fact, the initial wines were quickly recognized for their quality and distinctiveness, finding their way onto some highly prestigious wines lists (The French Laundry, to name but one) and even going on to be served at the White House. The wine sold well and raised considerable money, as Cristie explains: “we created a research grant at Stanford Hospital and gave them around $200,000.”
Over a decade of Curvature wines have been crafted at Pride Mountain Vineyards high above the Napa and Sonoma Valleys in California. Consistently ranked by Robert Parker among the top 100 wineries in the world, Pride brings its deep commitment to quality to the creation and production of Curvature wines. The final vintage of Curvature was made in 2017 and released in 2020.
