Brothers Tyler and Trevor Grace make wine at their family’s Lewis Grace Winery in the Apple Hill district just outside Placerville in El Dorado County.

They harvest grapes from the same estate vineyard. They make wine side by side in the same cellar. They sometimes work simultaneously with the same grape variety.

But each is responsible for a separate brand. By and large, Tyler is in charge of the family label, Lewis Grace.

Trevor is in charge of his brand Trevor Grace.

A rivalry is in play here, but it is low-key, not so much competitive as supportive in a warm

Tyler Grace, left, and brother Trevor Grace in the family’s winery barrel room.

brotherly way. “We vet each other’s wines,” Trevor says.

They don’t challenge each other to see if one can make wine better than the other. They rather push each other to do their best. They recognize that each has his own style. And they help each other to fulfill their individual goals.

“How can we make it better?” Trevor says they ask each other regardless of whose wine is being tasted and evaluated. “We egg on each other.”

On the wine-competition circuit, they do equally well. If there’s any difference in the proportion of medals, ribbons and other high awards they win, it is due more to the number of wines each enters and the unpredictable variability of judging panels.

Together, they win a lot. In the tasting room the brothers share, one corner next to a bank of windows facing east toward the snowy Sierra constitutes its own rising sun of blinding gold ribbons and medals.

Visitors to the tasting room face an unusually varied lineup of wines, not only because of the two brands but for the approximately 23 varieties of grapes with which the brothers work, most of them estate grown. Each vintage, they turn out some 30 wines, about 75 percent of production under the Lewis Grace label, 20 percent under the Trevor Grace label. (Two stand-alone brands, FIVEPM, an everyday red blend, and Fashionably Late, a late-harvest white that steadily wins best dessert wine on the competition circuit, account for around five percent of the winery’s output.)

Under the Lewis Grace brand, for which Trevor occasionally plays a hand, there’s such varietal wines as Verdelho, Viognier, Pinot Noir, Petit Verdot, Tempranillo, Charbono, Souzão and the usual Sierra-foothill suspects Petite Sirah, Zinfandel, Barbera and Syrah.

Not as many varietal wines are released under the Trevor Grace brand, but they give just a hint as to the different creative bent of the brothers. They include Grenache, Touriga and a late-harvest Semillon.

Both brothers make Cabernet Sauvignon, a challenging variety for the foothills but the one grape on which the family staked its standing when it began to plant its 16-acre vineyard in 2002. The Graces devoted five acres to Cabernet Sauvignon alone, their single biggest block, and still believe in its potential for the Mother Lode.

Given that both brothers take advantage of that fruit to each make their own version of Cabernet Sauvignon, that seems the apt varietal wine with which to commence a tasting aimed at defining differences in their styles.

The 2019 estate Cabernet Sauvignons made by both consist of approximately equal portions of clones 337 and 7. Both wines are invitingly, distinctly and cleanly aromatic. Their suggestions of fresh dark cherries extends across the palate, underscored with a hint of herbaceousness and a rendering of vanilla and spice from the oak with which the wine was aged – French and American barrels for the Lewis Grace, French innerstaves for the Trevor Grace. With each, tannins are relaxed and the fruit dominant, adding up to wines of character and harmony. (Each sells for $35, but both are sold out.)

Differences in the wines were slight – the Lewis Grace a touch more aromatic, the Trevor Grace a little darker, a bit more pronounced with oak, somewhat more acidic.

Differences reflect the brothers’ varied early grounding in the wine trade as well as their different aesthetic goals.

Before moving to the Mother Lode, Tyler Grace, who holds a degree in earth sciences from Dartmouth College and a degree in viticulture and enology from California State University, Fresno, worked seven years in Napa Valley, principally under the tutelage of Anthony Bell, founding winemaker of Bell Wine Cellars at Yountville. Bell himself earned his Napa Valley winemaking chops working alongside such influential winemakers as Andre Tchelistcheff and Dr. Richard Peterson at Beaulieu Vineyard, where Bell established his enduring interest in crafting forthright and balanced Cabernet Sauvignons that highlighted vineyard transparency.

Trevor Grace came to winemaking later than Tyler. Trained as a photographer and filmmaker, he initially handled marketing responsibilities for the winery before earning a master’s degree in viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. He still has his hand in promoting the winery – sending out social-media blasts, presiding at winemaker dinners and the like. His practical winemaking skills were honed during 10 years of working for wineries in El Dorado and Amador counties, in particular for Jeff Runquist of Jeff Runquist Wines in nearby Shenandoah Valley.

Lewis Grace Winery was founded initially as Grace Patriot Wines in tribute to the Revolutionary War patriot Lewis Grace, a distant grandfather to Steve Grace, who with his wife Bea established the winery in 2004. Lewis Grace was killed in the battle of King’s Mountain in South Carolina on Oct. 7, 1780.

Early on in the winery’s history, the Grace family removed a bust of a Revolutionary War patriot on the winery’s label and changed the name of the brand to Lewis Grace. This was in response to pushback in some markets where potential customers were offended by references to “patriot,” though the wines were selling well in comparably conservative areas.

At any rate, Tyler Grace today sees the Lewis Grace label as representing his seasoning in Napa Valley, where wines emphasize rich extraction and big and solid builds. His wines customarily are dense and concentrated, meant to age, though accessible upon release. “I follow a traditional winemaking style, with more extraction and slightly higher pH,” Tyler says. “I prefer firm structure.” (The pH level of a wine indicates the intensity of a wine’s acidity, with higher readings suggesting less intense acidity.)

Trevor Grace, who began to release wines under his eponymous brand from the 2014 vintage, seeks in his style wines that are fruit driven, a tad more acidic and more approachable at a younger age. He likes to work with oak that is more aromatic than Tyler uses, but not so much that it will be as pronounced as it is in wines by Jeff Runquist, from whom he learned the advantages of innerstaves. “In contrast to Jeff, I dial back the wood a bit,” Trevor says. (Innerstaves are planks of various kinds of oak inserted into vessels of wine to provide the aesthetic influence of wood without the expense of continually buying new barrels.)

Beyond the brothers’ Cabernet Sauvignons, their wines represented their individual goals with clarity, vitality and symmetry. While Tyler Grace likes to emphasize structure in his wines, none bristled with foreboding tannins, each readily approachable despite their youth. The Lewis Grace 2021 Amador Barbera, the first the winery has made with grapes from the acclaimed Dick Cooper Ranch in Shenandoah Valley, is fully developed, aromatic and robust, but neither the ripeness of the fruit nor the toastiness of oak gets in the way of the wine’s bright suggestions of cherries or the variety’s telltale frisky acidity. (The Barbera is expected to be released in early 2023, with an anticipated retail price of around $35.)

The Lewis Grace 2019 Estate Souzão ($34, but sold out) was startling in its seamless blend of sweet and lilting fruit, spicy oak and thin threads of pipe tobacco and leather. Souzão, also known as Sezão, is a black Portuguese grape used to make Port and dry table wines in Portugal, but not extensively farmed in California, through dry table wines based on blends of traditional Portuguese grape varieties are starting to draw the attention of the state’s winemakers.

By comparison, Trevor Grace’s wines tended to be leaner and more pointed, including a 2021 Estate Grenache that by its flourishing aroma, exceptional fruit and silken texture shows again why Grenache is seen in the foothills as a fitting substitute for Pinot Noir, which only rarely holds up under the region’s torrid summer heat.

The Trevor Grace 2021 Touriga ($33) is a spirited testimonial to Trevor Grace’s appreciation for snappy acidity in his wines, having that as well as a fruity freshness suggestive of both Beaujolais wine and Lapin cherries, and surprising length for a wine with such vital acidity.

The Grace family, as other winemakers along the foothills, is coming off two straight years of exceptional challenges. This spring, two hard freezes hammered vineyards, resulting in lost fruit that ranged from light to substantial, depending on site. The Graces figure they lost one-fifth to one-fourth of their crop.

This followed the previous summer’s wildland Caldor Fire, when smoke and ash raining on vineyards ruined about half of the family’s crop. Mitigation measures they have taken with grapes they salvaged, however, such as treating lots with various filtering methods and the use of judicious blending, have left wines from 2021 largely free of any suggestion of smoke, and what little may be there is more tantalizing than offensive. Clearly, the Barbera, Grenache and Touriga that were tasted conveyed a sense of unblemished grapes.

The most unusual twist for Lewis Grace from fire-impacted 2021 occurred earlier this year at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition at Cloverdale, Sonoma County. The Lewis Grace 2021 Estate Rosé won best of class against 25 other entries in its group – dry blush blends. That, despite a thin and elusive thread of wildland smoke in the wine, a blend of 82 percent Grenache and 18 percent Pinot Noir, selectively picked and handled to avoid the most obvious influence of smoke. We tasted the wine again the other day, though it has long been sold out at the winery. It remains obediently fruity, though the smoke seemed a bit more evident, with the wine overall suggesting mezcal as well as Grenache and Pinot Noir.

With the 2022 rosé, Lewis Grace could have another high-award winner. The 2022 is totally Grenache, with a coppery sheen to its pink color, but it is a more intensely fruity blush wine, filling the mouth with suggestions of refreshing strawberries and pomegranates. It is unusually energetic and incessant for a pink wine.

With all its brands, Lewis Grace Winery produces about 4000 cases in a year unaffected by fire and freeze. More than a third of sales are through the winery’s tasting room and wine club. Beyond that, distribution is concentrated in Reno and the Lake Tahoe basin, with just a little reaching Sacramento. The family previously lived in Reno, where Steve Grace was a plastic surgeon, though he and his wife now reside at Gardnerville when they aren’t at their Apple Hill residence.

All the family’s brands customarily are available to taste at the winery unless they are available solely to wine-club members or sold out.