Sacramental wine in Martinez, then the Napa Valley.

The Christian Brothers in the name are the De La Salle Brothers, formally the Brothers of the Christian Schools, a Catholic order of lay teachers founded in France by Jean-Baptiste de La Salle and recognised by the pope in 1725. The brand’s own history describes them as laymen rather than priests, dedicated to teaching, and notes that the order founded schools in the United States including Saint Mary’s College in California and Manhattan College in New York.

The order reached Martinez, on the Carquinez Strait in the San Francisco Bay area, in 1868, English Wikipedia says, citing a 1989 Los Angeles Times article by the wine writer Dan Berger. From 1882 the Brothers made wine there, for both table and sacramental use, and the brand dates itself to that year. The company says the community found a vineyard on its new land, used its grapes for sacramental wine, and later sold table wine to support its schools.

Prohibition narrowed the business. English Wikipedia says that after 1920 output was cut back to sacramental wine, which remained legal, and that in 1932 the Brothers moved the winery to their Mont La Salle property in the Napa Valley; the company’s own timeline puts the move to Napa in 1930. In 1935, according to English Wikipedia citing a 2004 SFGate article, Brother Timothy Diener became the order’s wine master, a post he held for fifty years.

Brandy grew out of that cellar. English Wikipedia says the Brothers began distilling brandy with a pot-still method of the kind used in the Cognac region. The company dates the start of Christian Brothers Brandy to 1940 and credits Brother Timothy, as cellar master, with creating it from Napa Valley grapes.

A stone cellar, a valley winery and a brandy at scale.

The Brothers’ most famous building was not at Mont La Salle. English Wikipedia says the order leased Greystone Cellars, a large stone winery near St. Helena, in 1940 and bought it in 1945, and used it for sparkling-wine production from 1950 to 1989. The building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1978, while the Brothers owned it. In the order’s production setup, English Wikipedia says, citing the Los Angeles Times, a site at Reedley in the Central Valley handled generic wine and brandy, while Greystone was used for barrel ageing.

By the late 1980s the business was large. English Wikipedia, again citing the Los Angeles Times, gives figures for 1988 of 250 employees, 900,000 cases of wine and 1.2 million cases of brandy a year. The company says that by 1950 the Brothers were among the leading suppliers of table wine in the United States.

The name on the bottle has always been the order’s own. The brand is still sold as The Christian Brothers, with the definite article. The company describes its method as the copper pot-still production used for fine Cognacs, “just as the Brothers first made it over 75 years ago,” a description that is the company’s.

Design and documentation.

The seven brands in this group are all gin, vodka and brandy names: Four Pillars, Ki No Bi, Deep Eddy, New Amsterdam, Chopin, Christian Brothers and Paul Masson. Spirits brands in general sit at many different points in the trade, from independent distilleries that still carry a founder’s name to labels that now belong to much larger drinks groups, and a single brand can be sold everywhere from a corner shop to a cocktail bar.

A gin, vodka or brandy brand’s identity is usually carried less by a single bottle than by a label, a name and the place it promises, because the company behind the name may have changed hands, moved its production or grown far beyond the place where it started. That makes the questions behind each name worth asking plainly: who started it, who owns it now, and where its spirit is actually distilled and bottled.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its spirit is made and how its labels have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

From the order to Heublein to a Kentucky distiller.

The Brothers left the business at the end of the 1980s. The company says that Brother Timothy retired in 1986 and that the order then decided to sell its brandy and winery operations. English Wikipedia, citing the Los Angeles Times, says the winery and vineyards were sold to Heublein in 1989; English Wikipedia’s article on Greystone says Heublein also took over that building, and the Napa Valley Register reported in 2009 that declining market share and the cost of seismically retrofitting Greystone were reasons for the sale. The Culinary Institute of America later turned Greystone into a campus.

The order kept two things. English Wikipedia says the Brothers retained the Mont La Salle property, which hosts a retreat, and that four former winery executives bought the sacramental-wine brand, which continues as Mont La Salle Altar Wines.

The brandy is now owned by Heaven Hill, which says on its website that Christian Brothers was first crafted by the De La Salle Brothers in California in 1882 and is now produced by Heaven Hill. The brand’s website says the brandy is bottled by CB Vineyards in Bardstown, Kentucky, and that it is aged for at least two years in bourbon barrels. Alongside the VS brandy, the range includes flavoured versions in apple, peach and honey.

The name needs care online. “Christian Brothers” also refers to the religious order itself, to the separate Irish order of Christian Brothers founded in 1802, and to the many schools and colleges that carry the name; the brandy’s own site is christianbrothersbrandy.com.

For a design guide, Christian Brothers shows how a brand can keep the name of the order that founded it, and the date that order chose as its starting point, for decades after the order stopped making it. Compare Paul Masson, another Californian brandy name, and Courvoisier, the Jarnac cognac house. For this guide we use brandy amber, cellar brown and label cream with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Christian Brothers’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.