From the Ground Up

The year she graduated from college, Amanda Harlan experienced what, for many of us, would feel like a pretty inauspicious beginning to the rest of her life. A brief stint at LVMH had ended, she and her boyfriend of nine years had split, and the horse whom she had spent nearly a decade training with suffered an injury that would require years of rehab. “It’s like everything that made up my identity at that point was pulled out from under me,” she says. So she did what we’ve all threatened to do once or twice in our lives: She took out all the money she had saved up since her teen years, packed a backpack, and spent six months figuring out who she was, freed of all of the identifiers she’d held on to for so long.

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“I traveled all over Europe by myself, met this South African guy, followed him to Indonesia, followed the surf for a few months. It was wild,” she tells me in August from her home in Southern California, cheerful and charming, not to mention glowingly eight-and-a-half months pregnant. “It gave me so much understanding of who I was with no responsibility. I had never experienced that before.” But the thing about escape? No matter where you go, there you are. Around Christmas that year, she came home, moved back in with her parents, and decided it was time to get back on the horse and learn the family business from the ground up. (Literally, in both cases.)

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About that ground: In the late 1970s, her father, Bill Harlan, turned a run-down country club into the valley’s first luxury resort, Meadowood, and turned an extremely successful career in California real estate development into an exceptionally successful Napa-based wine dynasty. He famously has a “200-year plan” for the project, which encompasses The Napa Valley Reserve, Harlan Estate, Bond, and Promontory wineries—plus the hotly coveted and highly priced wines that they produce. Amanda and her brother, Will Harlan, grew up alongside the vines but were encouraged to pursue their own interests (competing as an elite equestrian, and in Silicon Valley, respectively).

No matter, the two siblings both eventually found their way back more than a decade ago: Will, to spearhead a new wine initiative he dubbed The Mascot, and Amanda, home post-rumspringa, rising through the ranks, working on barrel fermentation, and growing into several different roles across the organization. She took the same indefatigable attitude she has on horseback and applied it to her new roles, going from director of communications for Napa Valley Reserve and Meadowood to her latest position of family director, in which she oversees the company’s culture and philanthropic giving and serves as a kind of ambassador and steward of the Harlan vision. “I got into the world of wine because I love wine,” Amanda tells me, “but I’ve stayed because I love people.”

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These days she thinks a lot about legacy, for both professional reasons (we’re only a handful of decades into that 200-year plan, after all) and personal ones. Namely, when we speak she is due to deliver her first baby with her husband, Jason Maltas, in three weeks. Working with her family is “such a joy. It’s a privilege,” she adds. “It’s also a huge, massive responsibility, standing on the shoulders of giants and finding some space in our place and adding the most value to what we’re leaving this generation and how we’re raising the next.” It’s the family way.