Gavin Newsom built a career shielding illegal aliens from federal law, and California taxpayers keep footing the bill.
His office swears the governor’s private fortune sits behind a wall he can’t see over.
And three reporters just followed one paper trail Newsom insists he never touched.
Newsom Never Let Go of the Family Wine Business
Newsom got into the wine game in 1995, when he founded PlumpJack Estate Winery in Oakville. The company kept buying after that. It added CADE on Howell Mountain in 2005, Odette in the Stags Leap District in 2012, and Ladera Vineyards, now called 13th Vineyard, in 2016.
In August 2022, PlumpJack paid $14.5 million for the 129-acre Oso Vineyard in Pope Valley. That purchase pushed the company’s Napa holdings past 400 acres.
Newsom kept his stake when he moved into the governor’s office. Tax returns for Newsom and his wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, show at least $11 million in income from 2019 through 2024, and the wineries, restaurants, and other investments supplied most of it.
That’s a nice living for a man who lectures everybody else about greed.
Christopher Rufo, Ryan Thorpe, and Kenneth Schrupp of City Journal went digging into who actually works those vines. They combed through court documents, federal labor reports, and oversight records, and they made several reporting trips to the valley.
And what they found doesn’t flatter the governor one bit.
The Vineyard Manager With a Paper Trail
PlumpJack contracts with Renteria Vineyard Management to run the fields at Oso. A PlumpJack website calls company owner Oscar Renteria the vineyard’s “long-time vineyard manager.” When City Journal asked, neither PlumpJack nor the management company disputed the arrangement.
RVM ranks among the biggest outfits in the valley. The company manages more than 2,200 acres with 80 full-time workers and up to 400 seasonal hands, according to the Napa Valley Grapegrowers.
Renteria has dropped hints about his workforce for years. He gave the American Immigration Council this line in 2017: “Many of our farm workers have what I call a complicated immigration status.”
Complicated. That’s one word for it.
A former longtime RVM employee gave a blunter estimate. The man told the reporters he has lived and worked in the country illegally for more than a decade. “About 80 percent of all of us who worked there,” he said of the illegal share of the crews. Asked whether the company knew, he answered, “Absolutely, of course. There was a lot of them.”
The same source alleged that a foreman lined up workers through a contact near Tijuana. RVM ignored City Journal’s requests for comment, and no court has tested any of these allegations.
But Washington had already caught the company once. In 2022, the Department of Labor found wage-and-hour violations involving 45 RVM employees and ordered back wages and civil penalties under the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act. Two workers later sued over unpaid wages, and one of those cases settled in September.
The federal guest-worker filings tell their own story. H-2A records listed Oso as a worksite in 2022 and 2023, and then the trail goes cold. The reporters found no application naming RVM or PlumpJack as an employer. RVM doesn’t appear in the government’s E-Verify database either.
One Phone Call Answered the Question Nobody Asked Out Loud
Here’s the part that ought to make the Newsom camp sweat.
A City Journal contact phoned RVM in Spanish, posing as a Mexican national who had just arrived and needed work. The woman on the line asked for a Green Card. He told her he had neither a Green Card nor a Social Security number. She took his phone number anyway and said a manager would follow up.
An illegal alien who has lived in California for more than two decades heard about the call. “That means they’re going to hire him,” he said. He added that fake Green Cards come easy in California. “That’s easy,” he said.
A vineyard owner near Oso, who asked the reporters to keep his name out of print, explained why few growers ask questions. A management company puts distance between the owner and the crews. “The politics are dirty,” he said. “We don’t worry about that stuff . . . . When you need it, you need it.”
Down the road, the PlumpJack tasting room charges up to $125 a head. A bottle of the 2022 Odette Reserve Cabernet goes for $400, and Rufo claimed on X that the governor sells his wine for up to $7,000 a bottle.
Somebody is getting a bargain. It isn’t the American farmhand.
A Blind Trust With a Sharp Eye for Legislation
Newsom spokesman Izzy Gardon told City Journal that 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.”
Fine. Maybe Newsom never once asked who picked the Cabernet. Plenty of rich men never ask where the help comes from.
But a blind trust only covers the business. It doesn’t cover the governor’s desk.
Oscar Renteria donated to Newsom’s first run for governor. Renteria also gave to the political arm of the California Farm Labor Contractor Association, which joined a coalition urging Newsom to veto AB 1136. That coalition warned the bill could give employers “constructive knowledge” that some workers lacked authorization, which would make pleading ignorance a lot harder. Newsom vetoed it the next month.
Then comes the taxpayer side of the ledger. Napa County runs three taxpayer-funded farmworker housing complexes offering subsidized rooms, on-site health care, English classes, and legal services. City Journal confirmed illegal aliens live there. The state started chipping in $250,000 a year during Newsom’s first full year in office, and in September 2026 he signed AB 1890, raising the state’s share to as much as $500,000.
So the public covers the bunk, the doctor, and the lawyer. The growers save on costs. And the governor’s own wine company sits right in the middle of that industry.
That isn’t charity. It’s a business model with a state seal on it.
The pattern runs statewide. Newsom set aside $35 million in February for legal services for illegal aliens facing deportation. He has bragged about extending Medi-Cal to illegal aliens, and City Journal estimates California taxpayers spent at least $11 billion subsidizing illegal aliens in the last fiscal year, all while the state charges the highest tax rates in the nation.
Democrats Once Sank a Cabinet Pick for One Nanny
Democrats used to treat this kind of thing as disqualifying, at least for a few weeks in 1993. That January, Bill Clinton’s first pick for Attorney General, Zoe Baird, withdrew after the public learned she had employed an illegal-alien couple from Peru as a nanny and a driver. Democrats ran the Senate, and her nomination collapsed anyway.
One household. Two workers.
Newsom’s wine company contracts with a manager who hires up to 400 seasonal hands, and a former employee claims most of the crews were illegal. Nobody in the Democrat Party seems the least bit bothered.
And there’s a reason for the silence. The cheapest labor in the valley comes with a taxpayer subsidy attached, and the people who pay for it are the same working Americans whose wages get undercut. Every illegal hire in a vineyard is a job an American citizen or legal resident could have filled at a fair wage, if growers weren’t counting on a workforce too scared to complain about missing overtime.
Voters already know which side they’re on. Cygnal’s late-January 2026 survey of likely voters found deportation of illegal aliens winning 61 percent to 34 percent.
But Newsom has his eyes on 2028, and expect plenty of talk about amnesty dressed up as compassion. The Napa books show who actually cashes in when the border stays loose. It’s the guy selling $400 bottles of Cabernet, not the guy sweating in the rows at five in the morning.
Gavin Newsom’s office says the governor can’t see a thing behind the wall around his wine fortune. His veto pen still managed to find the one bill that would have made somebody look.
Sources: City Journal, “Gavin Newsom’s Illegal Labor Problem” (Christopher F Rufo, Ryan Thorpe, Kenneth Schrupp); City Journal Daily Newsletter; Breitbart News, “Report: Gavin Newsom Builds Wine Empire Using Illegal Migrant Labor”; RedState, “Newsom Got Rich Selling Napa Wine, Wait Until You Hear Who Picked the Grapes”; yourNEWS, “Report Alleges Newsom’s Wine Business Relies on Illegal Immigrant Labor as Federal Violations Surface”; American Greatness, “Report: Newsom’s Wine Empire Relied on Illegal Migrant Labor”; The Horn News; Cygnal national survey of likely voters, January 2026