Napa Valley’s Sutter Home hopes for sweet success with new line of ready-to-drink tea, lemonade cocktails

The Napa Valley wine company that accelerated wine sales decades ago with white zinfandel plans a new tact — wine cocktails.

Sweet Tea, Peach Tea and Lemonade Wine Cocktails are the latest “brand expansion” for St. Helena-based Sutter Home, owned by the Trinchero family.

"Our tea and lemonade recipes made a big splash on social media, and we knew we were onto something. With that inspiration in mind, we crafted these deliciously sweet wines with real lemonade, tea and peach flavors to deliver on that need with our porch-perfect traditional wine packaging," stated Jennifer Hohman, director of marketing for Sutter Home.

The Sweet Tea, for example, is created by combining sweet white wine with tea flavors.

The company put the ready-to-drink tea market at $6.1 billion, with hard tea spinning off $289 million in sales in the past year.

In the early 1970s, Sutter Home created the first-ever white zinfandel and today the winery. It puts forth its other innovative credits as the first to produce the single-serve, 187mL package in lightweight plastic bottles.