Danica Patrick remembers the fog.
It was 2006, and she was visiting Napa Valley. The night before, she had dinner at The French Laundry. The next morning, standing on a hilltop at a winery in Rutherford, she waited for the thick fog to lift over the valley.
“I remember swirling my glass and looking out over the valley thinking, it would be so cool to have something like this someday,” Patrick recalls. “That thought never left me.”
For someone whose life had been built around speed, it was the beginning of something remarkably slow.
Three years later, Patrick purchased an undeveloped piece of land in Napa Valley, determined not simply to attach her famous name to someone else’s wine, but to build something herself. Her requirement from the beginning was simple: exceptional soil.
“I didn’t want to buy something already finished,” she says. “I wanted to build it from the dirt up.”
Today, that land is Somnium, Patrick’s 22-acre estate on the slopes of Napa Valley. The name means “dream” in Latin, a nod to that foggy morning and the idea that followed her down the hill.
Back then, the dream was largely about having a place of her own. Nearly two decades later, Patrick says its meaning has changed.
“It’s less about having it and more about the process, the patience, watching a vintage come together over years instead of a single afternoon.”
Learning to Wait
Patience was not exactly the quality for which Patrick first became famous.
The Illinois native became one of the most recognizable figures in American motorsports, breaking barriers in IndyCar and NASCAR during a career in which answers came quickly. Every race produced a result. Every lap offered data. Every fraction of a second mattered.
Wine offered none of that certainty.
“Racing gave me instant answers, right or wrong, that same day,” she says. “Wine doesn’t work that way. A decision you make this year might not show itself for a decade.”
The vineyard has delivered harder lessons, too. In 2020, wildfires took an acre of vines and nearly the entire vintage.
“You can plan everything perfectly and Mother Nature still gets the final word,” Patrick says. “I didn’t fully understand that until I lived through it.”
Somnium has been organically farmed since its first vintage in 2013 and became certified organic in 2019. For Patrick, that decision was less a marketing strategy than an extension of the way she approaches her own life.
“I work out, I watch what I eat, I pay attention to what I put in my body,” she says. “I want that same standard for what’s in the bottle.”
Her competitive streak has not disappeared. She tastes every sample before a blend is finalized and, in 2024, worked her own harvest, beginning at 4 a.m. She points to the 2015, 2019 and 2021 Cabernets as particular favorites, although Somnium’s 100% Cabernet Franc has quietly become the wine of which she is proudest.
“I definitely bring the same intensity,” she says. “But wine has taught me to hold that instinct loosely.”
Two Sides of Danica
Somnium is only one expression of Patrick’s life in wine. Danica Rosé, made in Côtes de Provence, reveals another.
If Somnium reflects the woman willing to wait years for vines to mature, Patrick says the rosé captures the part of her that still wants to get on a plane, discover a coastline and do something spontaneous.
“Somnium is where I slowed down,” she says. “Danica Rosé is where I still get to have fun.”
She’s also perfectly comfortable breaking some of wine culture’s unwritten rules. Drink rosé in January. Pour it over ice. Make a cocktail with it.
“Rosé all day isn’t just a saying for us, it’s actually how I drink it,” she says. “Honestly, that’s nothing new for me. Breaking a rule or two has always kind of been my thing.”
Coming Home to Chicago
Although Napa became an important part of Patrick’s life, Chicago never really left it.
After her racing career took off, Patrick bought a home downtown. Sixteen years later, she still owns it, returning for friends, restaurants, concerts, Blackhawks games and the simple pleasure of being back in a city she has loved most of her life.
The home, she says, has always been meant to be shared.
Friends and family stay there, sometimes even when she isn’t in town. When she is, Patrick likes showing visitors Chicago from the water on an architecture boat tour, walking through River West or returning to Erie Cafe, a longtime favorite. Eventually, everyone tends to end up back around her table, opening wine before heading out again for dinner, a game or a show.
Her Chicago wine fridge reflects that revolving door. French and Italian wines mingle with bottles from her own Napa vineyard. Friends arrive with bottles and leave others behind.
“It’s never really the same fridge twice,” she says.
There’s something fitting about that.
Eight years after retiring from professional racing, Patrick says the day-to-day world of the sport rarely crosses her mind anymore. The competitive instinct, however, remains. These days, she finds outlets for it on the golf course and, more recently, the tennis court.
But she resists describing everything that came afterward as a “second act.”
“That feels too neat for how it actually happened,” she says. “It’s been more like one long thread. Racing taught me the drive, wine taught me the patience, and everything I’m doing now, wine, media, all of it, is really just where that thread led.”
And perhaps that is the real dream Patrick found on that Napa hillside.
Not another finish line. Not another accomplishment to chase. Something slower.
Asked what she would tell the woman who bought an empty piece of land in 2009, Patrick returns, without intending to, to where the story began.
“I’d tell her it’s going to take longer than she thinks, and that’s okay,” she says. “I’d tell her the fog lifts eventually. Just stay on the hill.”
The dream today is simpler.
“Sharing this wine with people I love, being present for all of it,” Patrick says. “It’s less about the big swing it was back in 2006 and more about actually getting to live in it.”
For more information, visit somniumwine.com.