People
Members Who Became Stewards
If you look around our winery, you don’t merely see employees. You see longtime Williams Selyem List members who loved the wines and wanted to be a part of the Williams Selyem legacy. You can feel it in the air: What we do inspires a particular depth of passion and conviction.
I actually spent some of my student loan money to secure my first allocation of Williams Selyem. My association with and passion for these wines really does go all the way back to the beginning.
Team
Jeff Mangahas
Vice President, Director of Winemaking
Member #12548
Jeff grew up in Washington State, graduating from the University of Washington with a B.S. in Cellular and Molecular Biology. Beginning his career as a research scientist in Seattle, Jeff explored the deep, tannic vintages of Washington’s varied wine regions. When his career took him to New York City, he discovered another facet to his fascination with wine — pairing it with the city’s fine dining scene.
It was there, sometime around 1998, that Jeff tasted a 1996 Williams Selyem Allen Vineyard Pinot Noir. It stopped him cold. He joined the List, dove deep into wine culture, and started planning his next move. That move took him to France. His scientific roots and ongoing curiosity ran wild through the Burgundy and Bordeaux countryside — sampling, studying how place and climate create subtle variations in flavor and complexity. Jeff realized his hobby needed to become his career.
By 2003 he had an M.S. in Enology and was taking on his first harvest at Artesa Vineyards. He went on to Assistant Winemaker at Dutton-Goldfield, digging into cool-climate Pinot, then Winemaker at Hartford Family Winery, specializing in Pinot Noir from Russian River Valley and the Sonoma Coast.
Jeff joined the Williams Selyem team in 2011, spending a year learning alongside Bob Cabral before stepping into the head winemaker role in 2014 — only the third person to hold it in five decades. He came in leaning into Burt Williams’s minimalist methods and John Dyson’s fanatical attention to detail, and hasn’t let go of either.
Today, Jeff is still asking what makes a wine taste the way it does — now paired with a harder question: how do you coax the best out of each vintage? Away from the winery, you’ll find him in the garden, tending tomatoes, lettuces, and peppers, and gathering ingredients for a meal worth sharing. When he gets further afield, his destination of choice is northern Portugal’s Douro Valley — wine country that rewards the same patience and attention to place he brings to Russian River Valley every harvest.
François Faiveley
Proprietor
Member #149877
François Faiveley took over Domaine Faiveley from his father in 1976 at the age of 25, becoming the sixth generation to lead the Nuits-Saint-Georges estate founded in 1825. Over nearly three decades at the helm, his primary focus was expanding the family holdings through acquisitions across the Côte de Nuits and the Côte Chalonnaise, including significant development in Mercurey and Montagny. The result, built over decades, was a domaine of roughly 120 hectares with near self-sufficiency in high-quality fruit. This put François in a rare position in a region where sourcing great grapes is exceptionally complex. He handed day-to-day leadership to his son Erwan in 2005, who has continued the work of careful, considered acquisition.
François holds that there is no magic recipe for crafting great wines. It is, he says, the meticulous attention to a multitude of details that together create a truly beautiful bottle. He tasted his first Williams Selyem Pinot Noir years ago and remembers it as clearly as yesterday. Wine, he says, is like a human being: within the first second, you know whether you are meant to get along. He never imagined then that he would one day become part of this story.
Michael Thomas
Chief Financial Officer
Member #87498
Michael Thomas didn’t come to wine through a winery — he came through a glass, the way most obsessions begin. A California native who built a career in financial leadership across the wine industry, he has held chief financial officer roles at Rutherford Wine Company, Foley Family Wines, and most recently Cakebread Cellars. He earned his MBA at UC Davis, holds a WSET Diploma and is mid-pursuit of an enology degree from Las Positas College — because understanding the numbers has never been enough; he wants to understand the making of wine. He joined Williams Selyem in 2025, drawn to a place where the books exist in service of something worth protecting. Michael became a Williams Selyem List member in 2018 and began collecting the wines. Family birthdays and anniversaries always include his favorite selections from the latest releases of Pinot Noirs.
Chris Bowland
Director of Viticulture
Member #22245
Chris Bowland’s instincts in the vineyard are the product of serious, hands-on formation. He studied Agribusiness Management at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, spent years farming organic vegetables in Sonoma County, and completed an AS in Viticulture from Santa Rosa Junior College before turning his full attention to winegrapes.
His career in viticulture took shape at Lloyd Vineyard Management, where he and partner Doug planted Williams Selyem’s first Estate blocks in 2002. In 2006, he founded Bowland Vineyard Management. Today, Chris oversees all of the Williams Selyem Estate vineyards alongside a number of grower sites, totaling more than 400 acres of ultra-premium fruit across the Russian River and Bennett Valley AVAs.
When he’s not in the vineyards, he’s likely in his garden or fishing the Russian River.
Erwan Faiveley
Chairman
Member #149877
Erwan Faiveley grew up in Nuits-Saint-Georges as the seventh-generation steward of his family’s Burgundy domaine. His first taste of Williams Selyem was a 1995 Rochioli when he was living in Philadelphia in his early twenties. Since taking the helm of Domaine Faiveley in 2005 at the age of 25, he has refined the estate’s style toward greater finesse and led the visionary program of acquisitions of respected Premier and Grand Cru sites and petits domaines, expanding into Chablis, Puligny-Montrachet, Meursault, Volnay, and Pommard before realizing his dream of making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in California. His long-term relationship with Williams Selyem, first as a customer, then an investor and now as majority owner, reflects a shared commitment to single-vineyard expressions of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, and an insistence on thoughtful growth rather than fashion.
John Dyson
CEO
Member #2080
Longtime Williams Selyem List members John and Kathe Dyson acquired Williams Selyem in 1998, bringing decades of experience as vintners in New York, Tuscany, and California. A Cornell-trained agriculturist, John founded Millbrook Vineyards & Winery in the Hudson Valley, co-developed the Smart-Dyson trellising system, and earlier in his career helped launch the “I ❤ NY” campaign as a New York State official. Kathe, his partner in life and wine, has been closely involved in stewarding their estate projects and in shaping the culture of hospitality that keeps Williams Selyem grounded in relationships as well as vineyards.
Their path to becoming Williams Selyem’s owners started with Kathe. At a Masters of Food & Wine luncheon in Carmel, she tasted a Williams Selyem Pinot Noir and told the stranger beside her she’d never had a California Pinot that held up to Burgundy — until now. The stranger was Burt Williams. She persuaded Burt and Ed to add her directly to the mailing list, not the waiting list, and never looked back.
Philip O’Conor
Vice President of Sales & Marketing
Member #67845
Philip grew up in Geneva with a natural instinct for the table, one that led him through Michelin-starred dining rooms long before his path came into focus. He discovered early that wine and hospitality were less a career than a calling, and pursued both with uncommon dedication, working harvests at estates across Barolo, Burgundy, Bordeaux, Napa, and Sonoma. While working with Gonzague and Claire Lurton at their Grand Cru châteaux in Margaux and Pauillac, he helped bring their Sonoma project, Trinité Estate, to the American market. He went on to serve as General Manager at Wheeler Farms for the Araujo family, then Vice President of Marketing at Handwritten Wines and Jessup Cellars in Yountville. Throughout, Philip remained a Williams Selyem List member, receiving bottles that kept the benchmark close. He joined the winery in 2025.
Meet the Founders
Burt Williams
Founder
Burt Williams grew up along the Russian River and spent his early career as a printer and proofreader for the San Francisco Newspaper Agency, commuting from his home in Forestville. On weekends he made wine in his garage, guided by a self-taught but exacting sense of how Pinot Noir should taste. In 1979 he and friend Ed Selyem began turning old-vine Zinfandel and then Pinot Noir into the small, vineyard-focused wines that became Williams Selyem. After selling the winery, Burt purchased land in Mendocino County and grew grapes for Williams Selyem at his Morning Dew Ranch Vineyard. He passed away in 2019 at age 79.
Ed Selyem
Founder
Ed Selyem came to wine from the retail side: He was the wine buyer and accountant at Speer’s Market in Forestville, where he honed both his palate and his gift of building relationships with customers. At home, he experimented with beer and fruit wines before teaming up with Burt Williams in 1979 to make Zinfandel for friends. Ed became the architect of Williams Selyem’s business and allocation list, ensuring that the winery’s tiny production found its way into the right cellars. The same love of the outdoors that drew him to Sonoma’s farms and vineyards eventually called him further afield, to a retirement split between Hawaii and Alaska.
Community
Growers, Protégés, and Pinotphiles
