Newsom’s Winery Uses a Vineyard Crew a Whistleblower Says Is 80% Illegal

Gavin Newsom has spent years telling the rest of the country how to treat immigrants. A new investigation looks at who is picking the grapes on his own land.

Christopher Rufo, Ryan Thorpe and Kenneth Schrupp of City Journal spent weeks in Napa Valley digging into PlumpJack, the wine and hospitality company Newsom co-founded in 1995 and still profits from. Their report, published Wednesday, centers on the outside company PlumpJack pays to run the fields at one of its prized vineyards. A former worker for that company told them most of the crews were in the country illegally, and that management knew it.

Rufo put the short version on 𝕏, along with video of night crews working the vines.

A $14.5 million vineyard and the company that runs it

In 2022, PlumpJack bought the Oso Vineyard, a 129-acre spread in Pope Valley in the hills of northeast Napa, for $14.5 million. It brought the company’s Napa holdings to more than 400 acres, alongside PlumpJack Estate in Oakville, CADE on Howell Mountain, Odette in the Stags Leap District and 13th Vineyard.

PlumpJack’s own website names Oscar Renteria as Oso’s “long-time vineyard manager.” His family firm, Renteria Vineyard Management, says it manages more than 2,200 acres and employs 80 full-time and up to 400 seasonal workers. City Journal says it contacted both PlumpJack and RVM, and neither disputed the contract.

Newsom never sold his stake when he became governor. He put his business interests in what his office calls a blind trust. Between 2019 and 2024, tax returns for him and his wife show at least $11 million in income, most of it from wineries, restaurants and other investments, according to the report.

“About 80 percent of all of us”

The heart of the story is a former long-time RVM worker who says he has lived and worked in the U.S. illegally for more than a decade.

“About 80 percent of all of us who worked there [were in the country illegally],” he told the reporters. “The other 20 percent had regular status.” Asked whether the company knew, he answered: “Absolutely, of course. There was a lot of them.”

He also claimed a foreman had a contact near the border who sent workers up from an ejido, a farming community, near Tijuana. And he said many workers were not paid overtime and that safety rules were often ignored.

Those are one man’s claims, and none of them has been tested in court. But they line up with other things the reporters found. An anonymous owner of another Napa vineyard management firm put the share of illegal labor in the valley’s fields at “80 percent.” A vineyard owner told them the whole point of hiring a management company is the distance it puts between the owner and the people picking the grapes. “The politics are dirty,” he said. “We don’t worry about that stuff.”

A paper trail that stops in 2023

Farms that want legal seasonal workers from abroad can use the federal H-2A visa program. The reporters fed a Labor Department file with more than 400,000 entries into SI tools to hunt for any H-2A applications tied to Newsom’s vineyards.

They found three H-2A cases listing Oso as a worksite in 2022 and two in 2023. After that, nothing. They found no application naming RVM or PlumpJack as the employer, and no listings for PlumpJack’s other Napa estates. RVM also does not show up in the federal E-Verify employer database, according to the report.

Missing H-2A paperwork does not prove anyone broke the law, since a grower can legally hire citizens and green-card holders without it. But Renteria himself has talked openly for years. In a 2013 interview he described workers who were “nervous they’ll be tracked” and afraid of being deported. In 2017 he told the American Immigration Council that “many of our farm workers have what I call a complicated immigration status.”

The company also has a record. The Labor Department found wage-and-hour violations involving 45 RVM employees in 2022, ordering back wages and penalties under the federal law that protects migrant farmworkers. Two class-action wage suits followed, in 2024 and 2026, and one settled in September.

Near the end of their reporting, the team had a contact call RVM in Spanish, posing as a Mexican national who had just arrived and wanted work. The woman who answered asked whether he could pick grapes or drive a tractor. When he asked what papers he needed, she said a green card. When he said he had neither a green card nor a Social Security number, she took his phone number and said a manager would follow up.

Taxpayers in the middle

The report also connects the fields to Sacramento. Napa County has three state-backed farmworker housing complexes with subsidized rooms, health care and legal services. The reporters say managers at two of them confirmed illegal immigrants live there. The state put $250,000 a year into the program in Newsom’s first full year, and in September he signed A.B. 1890, raising the state’s share to as much as $500,000.

Newsom also vetoed A.B. 1136 after a coalition including the California Farm Labor Contractor Association warned it could leave employers on the hook for knowing their workers lacked papers. Oscar Renteria donated to Newsom’s first run for governor and to that association’s political arm, the report says.

Newsom spokesman Izzy Gardon told City Journal the governor “placed his business interests in a blind trust when he took office in 2019” and “has no involvement in PlumpJack’s operations or management.” A PlumpJack spokesperson said the company expects “all vendors working with [it] to comply with the law.” RVM did not respond.

Nothing in the report shows Newsom personally knew who was on the crews, as coverage like yourNEWS points out. But a governor who wants to run for president has built his brand on lecturing the rest of us about immigration and fair wages. His own winery now has to explain why the company tending its $14.5 million vineyard appears to run on the very labor federal law forbids.