Cafes & Wineries

Barry Schuler may know a thing or two about running multi-billion dollar technology companies, but what he really wants to talk about, given the chance, is food and wine. The former CEO of AOL, Schuler often gets credited along with Steve Case (who preceded Schuler as CEO) for the company’s success in the late Nineties. But while his colleagues and most of America’s top technology executives were returning home at the end of their long days to comfortable suburbs near major metropolitan areas, at the end of the week Schuler was making his way back to Napa, California. Schuler may have been one of the country’s top technology executives, but now he spends as much time thinking about wine as he does anything else.

Schuler says that he can remember wanting to live in Napa as early as the age of 18. In addition to dabbling in photography and filmmaking as a teenager, he says, “I was really into cooking. And drinking.” His obsession with food and wine, led him to the altar of Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse, which he visited for the first time in 1974 on the pretense of considering a graduate degree at UC Berkeley. Instead of attending his interviews and exploring the campus, however, Schuler dined at Chez Panisse, and drove to Napa, where he spent days wandering around in a daze. “It was like mecca,” he says, “like I was hit by a lighting bolt. It truly was amazing. I decided then and there that I had to figure out how to live [in Napa] someday.”

By his own account, Schuler spent the next 15 years “chasing French wine” and working out the math that would get him back to the Napa valley. While he wasn’t in his own kitchen dreaming of his future Napa estate, Schuler was busy making a name for himself in the emerging world of digital interactive media. He founded an early advertising agency to serve the emerging home and business computing market, then ran one of the first successful Macintosh software companies, and finally ended up founding an interactive design agency called Medior, with several colleagues, including Tracy Goldman, who is now his wife.

Schuler finally moved to Napa in 1989, settling closer to the town of Napa than to the centers of culinary and wine activity farther up the valley, because he was attracted to the change he saw underway in and around the city of Napa. “It was a train wreck in those days,” says Schuler, but he saw something of a diamond in the rough in the scrabbly area to the east and north of town known as Coombsville. When he finally decided he wanted a bit of land on which he might one day plant some grapes, “mostly just to sell, I was thinking,” he says, “I started looking in Coombsville.” Good lots were not immediately forthcoming, so Schuler would spend several years poking around the area until in 1998, when someone told him that a 35 acre parcel was due to be sold in the area, and that he might want to take a look at it.

After rounding the shoulder of the hill and seeing the view of a green cow pasture roll out from underneath the mossy shade of oaks all the way to the San Francisco Bay in the distance, Schuler purchased the property on the spot, thinking he’d figure out whether it could grow grapes later.

What Schuler ended up with is an interesting geologic and climatologic anomaly in the region. The hilltop of ash and clay soil is layered thinly on a deep base of round river stones, and sits up higher than most surrounding points in the traditionally cooler region of Napa. This makes the property a little island of heat that misses much of the fog influence that creeps up from neighboring Carneros and the wind patterns that sweep through the rest of the region, which is a pending AVA (American Viticultural Area) under the name Tulocay.

With the help of vineyard consultant Michael Wolf, close friends Bill and Dawnine Dyer, (of Dyer Vineyards) and friend Tony Soter (of Etude Wines) set about carefully establishing their 22 acre vineyard, still with the idea that they’d sell the grapes, and perhaps make just a tiny bit of wine for themselves. After some struggles, the vineyard began yielding grapes in 2003, and by the time the 2004 grapes were going into bottle, it was clear that the fruit was on track to being exceptional. The folks who had purchased the initial lots of grapes were clamoring for more, and new requests were constantly being made.

“At that point,” says Schuler, “we couldn’t resist.” Barry and Tracy enlisted the Dyers to make them 40 cases of wine from the 2004 harvest, and asked them to become the official winemaking team for their first commercial release in 2005. For the name of their project they selected a rephrasing of Medior, the company that had brought them together, and arguably made possible the fulfillment of Barry’s teenage dreams. For their label they chose the silhouette of the solitary, ancient oak tree that anchors the center of their vineyards.

Most of Meteor Vineyard’s grapes are still sold to select wineries around the valley, but the family holds back enough fruit to make about 700 cases of their estate Cabernet, and about 90 cases of their Special Family Reserve, which represents the best barrels from each vintage.

TASTING NOTES:
2004 Meteor Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a perky nose of nutty, cherry aromas that are tinged with hints of tobacco and anise. In the mouth its initial impression is of brightness and good acidity, with earthier flavors of tobacco, leather, cherry, and a hint of “stemmy” green wood that doesn’t keep the wine from being tasty. Score: around 9. This wine is not commercially available.

2005 Meteor Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine bursts from the glass with bright cherry and chocolate aromas that are followed rapidly with sweet tobacco and vanilla scents. In the mouth it is silky, even sexy, on the tongue, with a nice weight to it. The wine is juicy, with acidity that might even be slightly too sharp in comparison to the rest of the beautiful lush cherry and cedar fruits that mingle with pipe tobacco to finish with great length and satisfaction. I would expect this wine to smooth out in the next year or so in the bottle, and continue to improve for several more. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $225.

2005 Meteor Vineyard “Special Family Reserve” Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine smells of tobacco, earth, and cocoa powder. In the mouth it displays a deeper earthy quality than the label’s primary release. Nicely balanced flavors of cherry and wet earth, with hints of blue fruit, sit poised on the tongue, nicely balanced for a finish that feels like a leisurely backstroke in a placid pool, as the wine slinks and slips down the palate. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $300.

The 2005 vintage will be available for purchase starting at some point in the next couple of months. Interested parties can sign up for the winery’s mailing list on their web site.

I also had the opportunity to taste several clonal selections from different blocks of the vineyard, vintage 2007, that will soon be blended. These samples displayed a broad range of deep, complex fruit that are showing their first incarnations in the wines above. The clone 7 cabernet fruit was classically Cabernet Sauvignon — cherry with hints of stem tannins. The Clone 4 fruit was deep and earthy, with notes of slate and graphite aromas and spicy flavors of espresso and orange rind. Finally the clone 337 was an impressive, powerful luge-run of cherry fruit that nearly knocked my socks off. There are clearly many good things to come from Meteor.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

While often referred to as a single “place” when it comes to wine, Napa is hardly a single monolithic growing region. Each of its 14 established AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) lays claim to a separate identity, characterized by geology, microclimate, and different histories of production.

The Oakville AVA has one of the most storied of such histories. It is home to the famed To Kalon Vineyard, purchased by H.W. Crabb in 1868, shortly after the installation of a railroad stop made the tiny village of Oakville spring to life. In 1876 Crabb’s neighbor John Benson bottled his inaugural vintage of Far Niente wine just down the road.

By the year 1880 the Oakville area had 430 acres under production, and these would nearly triple to more than 1000 acres in the next 10 years and continue to grow until Prohibition turned off the spigot in the 1920′s.

In 1965 Heitz Vineyards made the first vintage of Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet, a wine that Robert Mondavi probably tasted around about the time he established his own winery a year later. Over the next thirty years, Oakville would gradually become home to some of the best wines on the planet. Acre for acre, the Oakville appellation may be the heaviest hitting single wine region in the western hemisphere. It is home to many of the highest scoring and highest priced wines in America, including Harlan Estate, Screaming Eagle, and Dalla Valle, to name just a few.

Oakville is ground zero for Napa Cabernet, and with good reason. Year over year it produces some of the most tremendous wines in the valley. It’s hard to say that one particular area of Napa truly produces the best Cabernet, but it’s also hard to find someplace that has more claim to that title than the Oakville AVA.

Last week the Oakville Winegrowers Association put on its annual Taste of Oakville event, which gives members of the wine trade and the press an opportunity to sample wines from its members. This meant an opportunity to taste through a lot of excellent 2004 and 2005 Cabernets (as well as a few other reds and a few random whites), most of which I enjoyed greatly. There were a few wines at the tasting which I didn’t get a chance to taste, as they had run out of wine by the time I got there, but the list below represents all but a few of the wines poured. The tasting took place on the upper level catwalks of the Robert Mondavi Winery surrounding their large oak fermentation tanks, which you can see in the photo.

WHITE WINES
2006 Flora Springs Winery &amp Vineyards Soliloquy White Blend. Score: 9. Cost: $25
2006 Cosentino Signature Winery Oakville Chardonnay. Score: 9. Cost: $30
2005 Kelham Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc. Score: 9. Cost: $30
2006 Oakville Ranch Chardonnay. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $48
2007 Swanson Rosato. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $18
2004 Teaderman Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $28
2007 Saddleback Cellars Pinot Blanc. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $24
2006 Robert Mondavi Winery Fume Blanc Reserve, “To Kalon Vineyard.” Score: between 8 and 8.5. Cost:$20

Now that we’ve gotten those out of the way, let’s move on to the main event, shall we?

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 9.5 and 10
2005 FUTO Red Blend. $250
2004 Harlan Estate Red Wine. $450?

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 9.5
2004 BOND “Vecina”. $400?
2004 BOND “St. Eden”. $400?
2004 Dalla Valle Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $150
2004 Sophie’s Rows Bordeaux Blend. $75
2005 Rudd Winery Oakville Estate Proprietary Red. $105

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 9 and 9.5
2004 Enzo Wines “Saunders Vineyard” Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon . $75
2002 Atalon “Beckstoffer Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $80
2006 Casa Nuestra Winery & Vineyards Tinto Classico - Old Vines Red Blend. $40
2005 Detert Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2004 Emilio’s Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon. $50
2005 Flora Springs Winery & Vineyards “Holy Smoke” Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards 575 OVX Cabernet Sauvignon . $??
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards 575 OVX G Major 7 Cabernet Sauvignon. $??
2005 Nickel & Nickel “Martin Stelling Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $135
2004 Opus One Red Blend. $165
2005 Showket Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Swanson Merlot. $38
2005 Tierra Roja Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $110

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 9
2005 Enzo Wines “Tierra Roja” Vineyard Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Far Niente Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon. $125
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards “Money Road Ranch” Cabernet Sauvignon. $54
2004 Kelleher Family Vineyard “Brix Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2005 Kelleher Family Vineyard “Brix Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2005 Nickel & Nickel “John C. Sullenger” Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. $90
2005 Nickel &amp Nickel “Branding Iron Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $90
2005 Oakville Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2004 Paradigm Merlot. $44
2005 Showket Vineyards “Asante Sana” Red Wine. $50
2005 Showket Vineyards Sangiovese. $35
2005 Stanton Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2005 Swanson Alexis Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2002 Teaderman Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $80

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 8.5 and 9
2005 Cosentino Signature Winery Oakville Estate Cabernet. $75
2005 Ghost Block Cabernet. $55
2004 Oakville Ranch Robert’s Blend, Cabernet Franc. $90
2005 Paradigm Cabernet Sauvignon. $62
2005 PlumpJack Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. $74
2005 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve . $125
2005 Venge Vineyards, Family Reserve, Merlot. $45

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 8.5
2005 Groth Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville. $57
2005 Hoopes Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2002 Kelham Vineyards Merlot. $45
2005 Oakville East “Exposure” Cabernet Sauvignon. $100
2005 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville. $45
2005 Tamber Bey Vineyard Estate Cabernet . $65

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 8 and 8.5
2002 Kelham Vineyards Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. $100

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 8
2002 Kelham Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $45

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

If one were to speculate on the wine market as a savvy investor might in the small-cap stock market, the game would be the same: follow people you know with good track records. In the wine world, we′d also have to include a corollary about betting on great vineyard sites, but leaving aside the raw materials, it’s clear that most good wines don′t happen by accident. They’re made by talented people.

Finding talented people in Napa isn’t hard at first. There are a lot of them, many of whom have big brand names. When they start working for a winery, everyone pays attention.

But there are many more talented folks in Napa that never get the limelight of the big names. These are the “small cap” talents that are responsible for many of the small production wines throughout the valley that are just waiting to be discovered by anyone who can start connecting the dots between great vineyards and the people that work them.

Piña Napa Valley is owned and operated by the Piña Family, a name that might not mean much to most wine drinkers, but will turn the head of anyone who is reasonably involved in growing grapes in Napa. In the current generation, the Piña Family, through their firm Piña Vineyard Management are responsible for farming some of Napa’s most prestigious vineyards (Bryant, Pahlmeyer, Cafaro, Gemstone, Outpost, Showket, Sawyer, O’Shaughnessy, just to name a few), but the family has been making its home in the Napa valley since 1856 when their progenitor Bluford Stice led a wagon train into the valley from Missouri.

Only a few years after that wagon train, the family became involved in the wine business in Napa. They owned a vineyard just south of St. Helena, and Bluford Stice’s son became a prominent winemaker at the then famous Inglenook winery (now Rubicon Estate) The family has been part of the Napa wine industry ever since.

As early as 1979 the family had thought about making their own wine, even founding a company called Piña Cellars with that intention, yet somehow never found the time until they purchased a small property on Howell Mountain in 1996 and decided to put their viticultural talents to work for themselves.

Their Howell Mountain property is known as the “Buckeye Vineyard” and its partially terraced hillside surrounded by Redwoods, Oaks and Madrone trees border Ladera and Beatty Ranch.

The family has been producing wine from their estate vineyard for the past 7 years, and the last couple of years they have been acquiring long term leases on several more vineyard sites around Napa with the goal of producing single vineyard wines.

One of these sites is the D’Adamo vineyard which sits at the foot of Atlas Peak in the southern part of Napa. This sustainably farmed vineyard is planted with 100% Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Piña’s began their project with the wines being made by winemaker Cary Gott (a longtime Napa wine veteran and consultant who has worked for more vineyards than are possible to list). In 2001, Ted Osborne (of Storybook Mountain Vineyards most recently) took over as head winemaker, and is responsible for this particular wine. Osborne recently departed Piña, and has been replaced by the young Anna Monticelli.

This particular wine is aged for 18 months in 100% French oak (50% new) before bottling. 1147 cases are made.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Inky ruby in color, this wine has a rich and juicy nose of cherry and dark cassis aromas that are surprising and arresting for a Napa Cabernet. In the mouth the surprises continue with dark juicy flavors of black cherry and cassis wrapped in a package of silky tannins. The wine is beautifully balanced and dynamic on the palate, conveying darker fruits than typical for the varietal, making for an unusual and compelling experience. The wine finishes nicely, with lingering notes that nearly reach blueberry.

Food Pairing:
This wine would be a likely contender to accompany this beef stew with herbed dumplings.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $72

This wine is available for purchase online.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Three years ago this week I was making my way around the top restaurants of Buenos Aires, ordering too much food, too much wine, and having a grand old time. I had come to Argentina, in addition to simply relax, to find out whether or not there was anything worth drinking made out of a grape called Malbec.

The answer, of course, was a resounding “yes!” I managed to figure out why some serious wine lovers (and critics alike) had begun to quietly suggest that Argentinean Malbec was going to be the Next Big Thing.

This wine was NOT one of the wines I discovered when I was bumping along the back roads of Mendoza. But after tasting it, I sure wish I had known that both sides of the Pulenta family were making such awesome wines.

Pulenta Estate (not to be confused with Bodega Carlos Pulenta, which is run by another set of Pulenta sons) embodies the continued dream of the Pulenta family which began three generations earlier, near the turn of the century.

Angelo Polenta (the “o” later became a “u”) and Palma Spinsati, like thousands of others at that time, immigrated to Argentina from Italy in 1902. They settled in the broad farmlands that still occupy the alluvial plains of Mendoza, under the shadow of the snow-capped Andes Mountains. With the determination that embodies so much of the immigrant experience everywhere in the world, they began to scratch out an existence for themselves as they set down their roots.

By 1914, they had moved a bit farther north to the town of San Juan and had started a small winery and a very large family, one that would quickly grow to 8 children. Those 8 children went on to have their own children, while the family winery continued to prosper. From 1914 to 1997, the Pulenta family built a successful winery business that they eventually sold.

In 2001, a few years after the sale of their San Juan estate, Brothers Eduardo and Hugo purchased vineyard land not too far from where their family first began farming three generations earlier, and established Pulenta Estate Winery.

At 2900 feet above sea level, the estates 333 acres in the Lujan de Cuyo area of Mendoza typify the regions best managed vineyards. Densely planted, dry farmed vines imported from France and Italy are subject to some of the planet’s greatest temperature changes in the course of a day. This diurnal shift coupled with cool sunny days that typify the March harvest mean that properly tended grapes get to mature slowly and beautifully.

Like many producers in the area, the Pulenta estate produces three tiers of wine from their estate vineyards: a set of “Gran” reserve wines, a set of varietally labeled wines, and a set of “young release″ wines that are marketed under the brand “La Flor.”

Their top tier of “great” wines contains three different bottlings: a Malbec, a Cabernet Franc, and this, their “corte” or blend.

Comprised of 43% Cabernet Sauvignon, 29% Malbec, 21% Merlot, 4% Petit Verdot, and 3% Tannat, this wine represents the very best fruit from the winery. Picked from their best, lowest yielding vineyard blocks and then sorted painstakingly down to the individual berry level, each varietal is fermented separately and then aged separately for 12 months in new French oak barrels. Only then are the best of these barrels blended to make the roughly 515 cases of this wine that are produced each year.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Dark, almost inky garnet in the glass, this wine reaches out of the glass and grabs you by the scruff of the neck, suggesting (in the politest possible way) that you immerse your head in a cloud of cassis, black cherry, and well-oiled leather aromas. And once you’ve gone that far, you have to go all the way, letting the gorgeously satiny wine flow smooth and bright across your palate, soaking it with flavors that brilliantly mirror those initial aromas — deep cassis and black cherry, tinged with an leathery earthiness. The acid balance is superb, the tannins grippy with a hint of greenness that pleases more than it perturbs, and the finish is lovely. The wine overall gives the impression of being a smooth operator.

Food Pairing:
Give me a foot and a half of grilled blood sausage and a bottle of this and I’d be set for the evening - especially if I could watch the sunset fall on the Andes.

Overall Score: 9/9.5

How Much?: $35

This wine is tough to find. Some more recent vintages areavailable for purchase on the online.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

In some ways, if Mark Neal and his small winery, Neal Family Vineyards, didn’t make fantastic wines, it would be cause for extreme concern. Neal has been working in the vineyards since the age of eight, and his family business, which was responsible for his early employment among the vines, has been managing many of Napa’s finest vineyards for more than four decades. At this point, Jack Neal and Sons, which still carries the name of Mark’s father, who passed away in 1994, is the single largest vineyard management company in Napa according to Neal. They manage well over 2000 acres of vineyards for more than 60 growers and more than 70 wineries.

With so much prime Napa land under his direct control, and relationships with so many of the top producers and winemakers in Napa, if Neal Family Vineyards didn′t make great wine, they would have some serious explaining to do. Instead, Neal simply has purchased or contracted several vineyards around the valley over the past 30 years, and quietly makes small quantities of fantastic wine.

Mark Neal grew up in Rutherford, in the heart of the Napa Valley. When he wasn’t at school, he was on a tractor with his dad out in what were, at the time, a combination of prune and walnut orchards. Farming was the family business, to the point that when things needed to get done around the farm, every pair of able hands had to pitch in, including Mark. He fondly recalls his frequent breaks from school to work in the orchards.

“My mother was full Greek, and she was the one who would write the notes to get me out of school to work with the family,” he says with a wry smile. “My teachers used to be amazed at just how many Greek holidays there were each year.”

Calling the Neal family entrepreneurial might almost understate the case. Jack Neal realized early on that there was more future in growing wine grapes in the valley than in fruits and nuts. Neal moved into vineyard management before there were many people offering such services in the valley. With his wife managing the books, and his son at his side, Neal built an extremely successful vineyard management company that has grown and diversified over the years to include a vineyard development and construction company, a vineyard information systems and GIS systems company, and a bulk wine trucking company, all of which Mark Neal continues to manage on a daily basis, employing nearly 300 people.

The vineyard management company continues to be the pride of the Neal Family, and rightly so. Jack Neal and Sons currently manages the largest amount of Certified Organic vineyards of any vineyard management company in the state, some of which are widely acknowledged to be among Napa’s best vineyards.

“We started growing organic in 1984 for some clients, and at the time, I had no idea how we were going to do it. There weren’t very many [organic] materials available to us to use. Those few that were available were expensive, ineffective, or both.” Now, a full 90% of the vineyards that Neal farms are Certified Organic, with an increasing number moving towards biodynamic cultivation.

“We were also one of the first vineyard management companies to begin picking at night, starting in about ‘86″ says Neal, explaining his and his father’s self-education through trial and error in their attempts to help their clients make some of the best wine possible in Napa.

The one thing that Jack Neal never did, though, for all his knowledge and connections, was to make a wine under the family name before he passed away in 1994. He talked about it often with his son, and planted the seeds of a dream that Mark realized in 1998, adding yet one more business under the family banner, both in tribute to his father and as something that he could leave as a legacy to his own children.

At the moment, the Howell Mountain winery seems more like a playground for his kids, who, like their father in his youth, seem to have an endless amount of fun driving tractors around to cut the cover crops or disc the vine rows. The front of the (gorgeous) winery is beautifully landscaped with several species of dogwood trees and a pond filled with ornamental Coi (all designed and laid out fastidiously by Neal), but is also likely to be populated with several small bikes, the family’s two gregarious white German Shepherds, and most certainly one of Neal’s five children.

“Maybe they’ll want to be involved, maybe not,” says Neal, “but it will be an option if they’re not interested in construction or trucking.”

For now, it remains an intensely personal project for Neal, but one which he approaches with the seriousness that has made the rest of his businesses so successful.

Neal never actually ever uttered the phrase “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right” in my presence, but he didn’t need to. It’s written all over everything at the winery, from the the building, with its inventive and beautiful wrought copper detailing, to the way the wine is made by winemaker Gove Cielo and assistant winemaker and enologist Kelly Wheat.

As one might imagine, the grapes are hand picked with extreme care, almost always at night. They are sorted rigorously and destemmed, and then given a long cold soak before a long slow fermentation with wild yeasts begins. Since the winery operates well below capacity, the wines are left to finish fermenting as long as they take in the vats, in separate lots for each vineyard block. Only the free-run juice (the juice which can be drained off the fermenting grapes without pressing) is used for the estate’s wines, and the press juice is sold off in bulk. The wine is aged in 80% new French oak (100% new for single vineyard wines) along with some Hungarian oak.

As the wines age, Neal and his two winemakers taste and grade every barrel independently, giving each A, B, and C ratings. Any barrel that gets three A’s becomes a single vineyard designate, and any barrel that gets even one C gets sold off as bulk wine. The reds are never fined, and are only coarsely filtered before bottling. Most spend at least 18 months in oak and then another year in the bottle, though Neal has been known to hold wines back if he doesn’t feel that they are ready for release (just as he has been known to refuse release of wines at all if they are not up to his standards, as the 2000s weren’t).

Neal Family Vineyards produces about 6000 cases of wine each year, the majority of which is their Napa Valley Cabernet, which is blended from fruit grown in four vineyards in Atlas Peak, Howell Mountain, Mt. Veeder, and Rutherford. In addition to this wine, the estate currently produces six single vineyard wines, made in quantities of between 140 and 240 cases, as well as even smaller amounts of Petite Sirah and Zinfandel. Recently the winery also produced a Sauvignon Blanc.

Neal Family Wines are marked by a brightness and a balance that immediately made me take notice when I first tasted them at a Family Winemakers tasting several years ago. I also couldn’t help noticing the prices of the wines, which Neal hasn’t changed since the first vintage.

If you are able to get your hands on a bottle, these wines are deeply satisfying and deftly represent everything that is good about Napa Cabernet.

TASTING NOTES:
Click on wines to purchase.

2005 Neal Family Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a beautifully lean nose of espresso, tobacco, and dark chocolate aromas. In the mouth the wine is beautifully balanced between juicy, bright cherry and plum fruit and the lightly bitter cocoa powder and pungent espresso notes that emerge as the fine tannins cling to the tongue. The wine finishes beautifully — long drawn out notes of chocolate covered cherries that sing a plaintive song: “just one more sip….” Score: around 9.5. Cost: $45.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards Petite Sirah, Napa Valley
Medium purple in color, this wine smells smoky, leathery, and just a tiny bit funky (in a good way). In the mouth it is incredibly clear and bright with cassis and blueberry notes stretched between a hint of green stems and well oiled leather. Remarkably, the wine is only medium bodied and has fine, almost soft tannins that are far from the typical bruising grip that this varietal exhibits. Moderate finish. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $35.

2006 Neal Family Vineyards Zinfandel, Napa Valley
Medium garnet in color, this wine has a surprisingly chocolate nose, coupled with aromas of rich berries. In the mouth, chocolate continues to be the predominant theme, with some plump blueberries emerging at times amidst the silky palate. Frankly, this Zinfandel has a lot of Cabernet qualities, which are not so much unpleasant as they are unexpected. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $24.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Wykoff Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, Napa Valley
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine has a gorgeously perfumed, sweet nose of cherry fruit and floral scents that have the purity of a cloudless day. In the mouth, the wine is beautifully dry and the sweetness of the nose resolves into nicely balanced and smooth textured flavors of black cherry, chocolate, espresso and a hint of earth - though the cherry dominates the lengthy finish. My notes include the word “beautiful″ — circled and underlined. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Rutherford Dust Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in color, this wine has aromas of cherry, mocha, and leather on the nose. On the palate the wine is silky and bright with flavors of cherry and plum, with light tannins that bring a smoky note to the tasting experience. The finish is gorgeously long. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “One Lane Bridge Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Mt. Veeder, Napa Valley
Dark ruby in color, this wine possesses rich chocolate and cherry aromas that give way to equally rich black cherry flavors in the mouth. Excellent acid balance coupled with a deep fruit character and beautiful texture make for an intense experience in the mouth, and the finish is scented with cedar. Fantastic. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Fifteen Forty Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Howell Mountain, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in the glass, this wine has a pretty, spiced nose of cherry aromas mixed with a hint of allspice. In the mouth it continues in the spicy vein, as its predominantly cherry and cassis flavors are laced with notes of black pepper and tobacco. Bright acids and light tannins make this wine a pleasure to drink, right through its moderate finish. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Second Chance Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon, Atlas Peak, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in color, this wine mixes cherry aromas with the hint of green bell pepper that proudly proclaims Cabernet. In the mouth the wine is tightly coiled, but clearly expressive of leather, cherry, chocolate, and grippy, slightly aggressive tannins. The green bell pepper has come along for the ride on the palate as well, though not to the point of being truly objectionable, and certainly worthy of a second chance, perhaps in a year or two. Score: around 9. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Howell Mountain Estate Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Dark ruby in the glass, this wine from the vineyards surrounding the winery itself has a pretty, floral nose of cherry and hints of vanilla. In the mouth it is broad and expansive, with fine grained tannins that spread out, even as good acidity lifts flavors of cherry and plum over the tongue. A slight hollowness kept the wine from being as deep as it could be, but that’s a fine point on an excellent bottle of juice. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $90.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

The Loire Valley is perhaps one of the most underrated and unexplored (by most Americans) wine producing regions in France. So often eclipsed by the bombast of Bordeaux, Burgundy, and the Rhone, the Loire, if it is known at all, tends to be known for its famous Sauvignon Blanc from Sancerre. Yet the region, which is the largest white wine producing region in France, and the third largest winegrowing appellation (AOC) in the country, also produces many excellent red wines, chiefly from Cabernet Franc.

The most dominating feature of the Loire Valley must be the river itself, France’s longest and the last major river in Europe to remain un-dammed. The river cuts deep through dozens of different geologies spanning millions of years, from limestone and travertine to schist and granite, giving rise to many varied growing regions that spread outwards from the backbone of the river like shelf mushrooms on a tree.

About halfway along the Loire’s meandering march to the sea lies the town of Saumur, which lends its name to the large AOC appellation that spreads southwards from the town away from the river. The town (and indeed, many of its wineries) is build atop what is known locally as tuffeau, a calcareous rock similar to limestone (but more porous) which provides excellent drainage for vines and excellent caves which the locals use for storing their wine, much of which is a sparkling wine made from Chenin Blanc that required extended cellaring similar to Champagne.

One of the other salient features of modern Loire winegrowing involves the unusually high proportion of winemakers using organic and biodynamic winegrowing methods. And one of the two men chiefly responsible for that was a man named Francois Bouchet, who up until his recent death was France’s leading Biodynamic viticulture and winemaking consultant. Bouchet, who wrote what many consider to be the first real how-to guide to Biodynamic winemaking, consulted for biodynamic wineries all over Europe as well as some of the top producers in France, such as Domaine Leflaive, Domaine Leroy, and Domaine de la Romanee-Conti. When he wasn’t flying about helping winemakers remember how many times to stir their silica solution in each direction, he was at home making wine with his son Mathieu at their tiny Domaine de Chateau Gaillard.

The estate consists of only about 12.5 acres of vines, which are farmed, as one might imagine, according to the strictest principles of Biodynamics, which involve, among other things, the complete absence of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, or additives of any kind. The estate’s vines, which are some of the oldest in the region (some more than 80 years old) produce naturally low yields, which means that the estate produces only about 2000 cases of wine each year, only about 100 of which make it into the United States.

Mathieu Bouchet continues to run the estate just as it always has been. According to the dictates of Biodynamics, the wines are never racked, fined, or filtered before they are bottled. Bouchet continues to age the wines for several years only in large neutral oak casks, resulting in very little oak influence in the wines.

Tasting Notes:
Medium to dark purple in the glass, this wine resembles many red wines just before they are bottled - deep and shining with grapey color. The nose carries a deep aroma of what might best be described as: mud. Wet, wet earth combined with hazelnuts. In the mouth it is bright, tight, and tart, with excellent acidity and a juicy cassis and black cherry fruit that is married to a drying-chalkboard flavor which lasts long into a finish. This is not a deep, nor a complex wine, but it is no simpleton. Like many of its fellows in the Loire, it is a working-class wine with no pretentions at anything more - a fine dinner companion.

Food Pairing:
This versatile wine will go with a lot of things, though because of its dry, tanginess I don’t suggest it be served with anything spicy. Salty or sweet would be better, and I suggest salty. It might be a beautiful match for this spice rubbed quail.

Overall Score: 8.5

How Much?: $19

This wine is available for purchase on the internet. It is imported by Weygandt and Metzler.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

As Paul Draper was inducted into the Vintners Hall of Fame a couple of weeks ago in a ceremony at the Culinary Institute of America in St. Helena, his acceptance speech offered a simple exhortation to members of the wine industry in attendance: make great wines for yourself and for no one else. His suggestion that winemakers follow their own vision instead of chasing the critics or the appeal of the masses (though he did acknowledge that selling wine is important, too) was backed up by the quite confidence of a man who has been doing that for more than forty years.

A philosophy major in college, Draper spent time in the Army in Italy before a stint in the peace corps in Chile during the early sixties along with a college buddy named Fritz Maytag, who would end up making his own name in beer and in wine as the owner of the Anchor Steam Brewery and York Creek Vineyards. Together, Draper and Maytag began their first, self-taught forays into the world of winemaking with grapes from a local vineyard.

These early experiments would prove formative in many ways, and when Draper returned to the U.S. his focus was entirely on winemaking, and by 1969 he had reconnected with a group of engineers from the Stanford Research Institute that years before had purchased an old winery and vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains formerly known as Monte Bello.

The Stanford connection aside, in just a few short years Draper had taught himself an extraordinary amount about winemaking, and was an appealing candidate for the position of head winemaker at his friends′ winery, which they had dubbed Ridge Vineyards.

Despite the prodigious task of modernizing a winery that was essentially still operating out of an antiquated facility, Draper also set to work making his first commercial wine. To say that his first efforts were notable might be understating the case. When a young man named Stephen Spurrier organized what would be the most famous tasting in the modern history of wine a few years later, one of the wines he chose to represent California was a 1971 Ridge Vineyards Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon — merely Draper’s third vintage as a winemaker and the only red wine from outside the already famous Napa Valley growing region.

In what has become known as the 1976 Judgment of Paris, the 1971 Monte Bello placed fifth amongst the red wines, which meant it was effectively forgotten as Warren Winiarski’s Stags’ Leap Cabernet stunned the world by beating out the Bordeaux First Growths.

30 years later, Draper would need no affirmation of his talents or accomplishments, having established Monte Bello as one of California’s most distinctive Cabernets and along the way re-introducing America to the Zinfandel grape. But in 2006, Draper’s 1971 Monte Bello again came before the Judgment of Paris — conducted again with bottles of the original wines in celebration of the original event — and this time the Monte Bello was the clear winner, having held up better over the intervening three decades better than even Draper could have imagined, and significantly better than every other red wine present.

California has no concept of First Growths, but should we take the unadvisable step of codifying some of the greatest wines in the state, Ridge Monte Bello Cabernet Sauvignon would certainly be among the candidates. Anyone who has tasted this wine will understand the amusing irony that accompanies this fact, for Monte Bello is quite unlike many other California Cabernets. From its origins on the windy, fog buffeted ridge in the Santa Cruz Mountains, to its medium-bodied, low alcohol, claret-style winemaking, this wine is its own creature, through and through.

About 2500 cases of Monte Bello are made every year, from grapes grown in the estate vineyard. It is a blend of 76% Cabernet Sauvignon, 13% Merlot, 8% Petit Verdot, and 3% Cabernet Franc, made in typical Draper style (though the chief winemaker is now Eric Baugher, overseen by Draper). The grapes are destemmed but not crushed, and are fermented with native yeasts, and some of the wine (about 66%) ages for five months on the lees. In total the wine ages for about 18 months in 92% air-dried American Oak, and 8% new French oak. The final blend is assembled through several tasting sessions before bottling, which took place in April of 2006.

Its particular qualities of crisp fruit and flavor aside, I think what impresses me most about Monte Bello every time I taste it is the sheer, understated individuality it expresses. This is a wine that is the opposite of showy, the antithesis of impressive. Yet it never fails to satisfy, whether tasted just prior to its official release, as this bottle was, or after many years of patience.

Tasting Notes:
Medium ruby in the glass, this wine has an elegant, poised nose of cedar, cherry, and earth aromas. In the mouth it is bright and juicy with excellent acidity and a clean, claret style that lets flavors of cherry, cedar, and wet stones resonate like a plucked guitar string. Beautifully, even musically balanced, this wine resonates beautifully into a long, satisfying finish.

Food Pairing:
I’d love to try this wine with a cocoa and spice slow roasted pork with onions.

Overall Score: 9/9.5

How Much?: $125

This wine is available for purchase online.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

Do you want to know a little secret? I’m probably going to catch hell for telling you, especially from my friend Jack who served this wine to me, and who let me in on the secret in the first place. But he should know better than to tell a blogger anything.

So here goes: Pre-1980 California Cabernets are some of the best buys in the wine world right now. Sure, some of them, especially pristine bottlings of single vineyard Beringer or BV wines are going for hundreds of dollars per bottle, but with a little effort you can find bottles like this one, sometimes for under $30.

And some of these wines are simply tremendous.

The Charles Krug Winery, established in 1861 was one of the very first wineries to be established in the Napa Valley. Its founder, an enterprising young man of German-American heritage, came to San Francisco in the mid 1850’s to work as a journalist. Perhaps disillusioned with the newspaper business, which even back then was undergoing consolidation, he decided to try his hand at growing grapes as a means of supporting himself. He didn′t have much luck growing them (in the hills above what is now San Mateo) until he hooked up with an equally unsuccessful grape grower by the name of Augustin Haraszthy who convinced Krug that they should look elsewhere. This would prove fateful advice for them both, as Haraszthy would become known as the founder of the California wine industry, and Krug, one of its first success stories.

After the pair found their way to the Sonoma Valley, they secured work in a vineyard site that would later become Buena Vista winery, and began teaching themselves how to make wine. Krug was a quick study, and his talents were noticed by a number of people, but perhaps most importantly by a wealthy landowner named Louis Bruck who lured him to the Napa Valley. A few years later, after a short career as what wine historian John Olney suggests might be the first consulting winemaker in the history of California wine, Krug married Bruck’s sister-in-law, whose hand in marriage also came with the added bonus of 500 acres just north of the tiny hamlet known as St. Helena.

In short order Krug built his own winery (and then rebuilt it, and then built another as the first one burned down) and set about making some of Napa’s first commercial wines with the help of another young man of German descent named Jacob Beringer. Yes, that Beringer.

In 1875 at the height of his success Charles Krug founded the St. Helena Viticultural Society. That success proved short-lived, however, as winery after winery succumbed to the infestation of Phylloxera that was at the same time ravaging the vineyards of Europe. Krug, who once bankrolled many other winemakers, went bankrupt in 1891 and died about a year later.

After changing hands a couple more times through prohibition, the estate was purchased by an Italian immigrant named Cesare Mondavi, and became the birthplace and the battleground of America’s most famous and fractured wine dynasty.

In 1974 the Charles Krug winery was producing more than one million cases of wine per year, and was one of the most commercially successful wineries in the history of Napa Valley. It was also known the site of one of the most bitter family sagas that the California wine industry has known, the rift between brothers Peter and Robert Mondavi.

1974 was by all accounts one of the best vintages in California history. I’m not sure who was making the wine at this point at Charles Krug, as production had gotten big enough that Peter Mondavi wasn’t doing it all himself. In any case, the harvest was nearly perfect, and the wines were celebrated highly at the time.

Now, of course, this wine is old. So old, that most wine modern wine lovers would never imagine what a treasure lies inside. This bottle is a special selection from the winery “Lot F1″ which as far as I can ascertain represents the winery’s top vineyard blocks and barrels in a given vintage. While this particular bottling commands more money at auction, if its quality is any indication, the regular bottlings have got to be worth the $25 I have seen them selling for as many people liquidate older wine collections in which they have been sitting for years.

The older Cabernets of Napa, like this wine, are marked by an elegance and a lightness that Napa will probably never again achieve (if only because global warming makes it impossible). Just 12% alcohol and very light bodied, this wine speaks the secrets of an earlier era in Napa winemaking that are beautiful and alluring.

Every time I have a wine like this, I tell myself I ought to spend more of my money hunting down treasures like this rather than buying current releases. My only problem is that I don’t have time to watch the auctions at WineBid. So for now, I simply enjoy the generosity of friends, and the magic of grapes that were picked in the year of my birth.

Tasting Notes:
Medium brick-red in color with blood red, powdery sediment, this wine smells of stewed prunes, raisins, and caramel. In the mouth it is gorgeously smooth, and not juicy exactly, but…lively on the palate — swirling with flavors of roasted meats, cedar smoke, figs, and a light funkiness of sweat. The finish, one of my favorite parts of older wines, doesn’t disappoint — soaring away in notes of caramel and root beer. Not the most amazing old California Cabernet I have had, but certainly an excellent example of the form. Tasting wines like this makes me feel extremely lucky. Lucky to be alive, and lucky to love wine.

Food Pairing:
This is one of those wines that, while enjoyable with lots of different foods, tends to make me want to push my plate away and simply sit with my eyes closed, and my mouth full of wine, slowly letting it drizzle down my throat. Sometimes wines are best savored on their own.

Overall Score: 9

How Much?: $88 currently at retail, though can be had at auction for less.

This wine is available for purchase on the internet.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

Napa has a way of turning modest dreams into major productions. Lou Kapcsándy and his wife Bobbie decided to retire to Napa mostly out of nostalgia for the picnics and wine tasting they used to do as a young married couple living in Sausalito. Forty years after the first of these romantic escapes, their retirement dream included only a little cottage with at most an acre or so of vines, so Lou could putter in the garage and make a barrel or two of wine from his backyard fruit.

Three years after the family, including their son Louis, made the first tour of the small cottages for sale in the valley, the family was harvesting fifteen and a half acres of Cabernet and Merlot to make the first vintage of what will undoubtedly be one of Napa’s top wines for the decades to come.

Perhaps Lou Kapcsándy’s shrewd eye for a good piece of ground can be blamed for turning a simple retirement dream into an entirely new career and a family obsession. Born and raised in Hungary, a young, immigrant Kapcsándy (pronounced cap-CHAN-dee) spent some time in the military, and also as a pro football player before getting to know some scientists at Boeing and convincing them to let him build them a factory. A billion dollars of annual construction revenue later Kapcsándy knows how to size up a plot of land in more than one way. Along the way to building his company Kapcsándy had the chance to taste the 1961 vintage of Bordeaux, which immediately sparked an obsession with the region that led to annual pilgrimages for nearly 40 years. Kapcsándy has walked the vineyards of nearly every major chateau in the region, just as he now walks in his own vineyard every week.

All of which might explain why the Kapcsándy family happened upon a plot of land known as the State Lane vineyard, and promptly decided to get into the wine business in a serious way. Their vineyard, which retains its historical name based on its address at the corner of State Lane and Yountville Crossroads in Napa, was made famous by the Beringer Winery decades ago as the source for some of Beringer’s most prized vineyard designated fruit. The Beringer’s 40 year lease on the property had expired, but not before all the vines on the property had themselves succumbed to the predations of Phylloxera. Fairly neglected, and perhaps even partially forgotten, the vineyard represented an opportunity too good for the Kapcsándys to pass up.

Whenever someone takes over an historic vineyard in Napa, there’s a period of time when those familiar with it hold their breath. Like a new family buying an old, majestic house on the block, you never know whether they’re going to replace it with some modern monstrosity or refurbish it to the height of its glory.

By now, everyone in Yountville has breathed a sigh of relief. With the precision and aggressive timeline that no doubt characterized his work for decades before, Lou Kapcsándy ripped out all 15 acres of the beleaguered, Phylloxera infected rootstock and replanted the property in several blocks, each with rootstocks carefully matched to the several types of soil found on the property. In 9 short months, a brand new winery was also constructed, capable of shepherding the roughly 3000 cases the estate expects to produce safely from field to bottle.

The Kapcsándy Family Winery enlisted the help of Helen Turley and her husband John Wetlaufer to oversee the replanting of the vineyards and the first couple of vintages. Starting in 2005 the winemaking was transitioned to the team of Denis Malbec (cellar master of Chateau Latour) and Rob Lawson who spent 14 years as the head winemaker for the Napa Wine Company. Despite the caliber of their hired help, Kapcsándy Family Winery is run almost entirely by the family. Lou and his son Louis jointly make nearly every decision about all aspects of the winery’s operations (a natural extension of the partnership they began in 1999 when they started a wine importing business together), and the plan is for Louis (a chemical engineer by training) to eventually take over winemaking duties, after some time working with Malbec and Lawson, and some hardcore enology courses at U.C. Davis. During harvest Lou drives the forklift and Louis drives the grape truck.

Like many of Napa′s top vineyards, the winegrowing and winemaking regimen at Kapcsándy is extremely rigorous — from the dense precision spacing of the vines, to the strict yield reduction and canopy management, to the dogmatic insistence on harvesting the grapes only at phenolic maturity (a measurement of the presence and concentration of compounds like anthocyanins and tannins). Grapes are hand picked, block by block, in multiple passes through the vineyard, and are completely destemmed before being sorted, painstakingly, berry by berry into the fermentation tanks. During this sorting process, which involves dozens of people, up to 15% of the grapes are removed due to imperfections. Fermentations take place with minimal fuss or intervention. The wines are bottled completely unfined and unfiltered after aging in 100% new French and Hungarian oak for approximately 20 months.

“I have no interest in fruit bombs. No interest in huge, in-your-face wines that lack a mid-palate or structure,” booms Lou when asked what he’s trying to do with his wines. “I’m trying to make great wines, which to mean mean wines that are distinct, approachable in their youth, but fundamentally structured to age for a long time. We’re not trying to imitate any specific wine, but we are inspired by the great vintages of Bordeaux, all of which — ‘61, ‘64, ‘70, ‘75, ‘78, ‘82 — were good when they were young.”

The influence of Bordeaux is clear in Kapcsándy wines, even from first sight of the atypically broad shouldered bottle (made from a mold that the French sold to the Italians and which somehow made its way to Mexico) which reminded Lou and Louis of Haut Brion. Yet while these wines are remarkable in their European styling, they also bulge with an intensity that can only come from Napa, and are all the more compelling for it.

Full disclosure: some of these wines were received as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:

2006 Kapcsándy Family Winery Rosé, Yountville, Napa
Pale peach in color, this wine smells headily like herbs, dry Autumn leaves, and oak. In the mouth it is thick and weighty, sitting on the tongue like a linebacker swaddled in fine silk. The creamy wine lacks the acidity and brightness I normally look for in pink wines, and as a result the spicy cedar, caramel, and red berry flavors don’t spark excitement as much as they just resonate with a low hum, and fade after time with a sigh. Made from 56% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot and 4% Cabernet Franc. Score: around 8.5. Cost: $30

2005 Kapcsándy Family Winery “Estate Cuvee” Red Wine, Yountville, Napa
A cloudy, inky garnet color in the glass, this blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc has a rich, earthy nose of tobacco, dark espresso, and leather aromas that include a hint of sweet oak. In the mouth the wine immediately takes charge, sculpting a flavorful experience of well-oiled leather, black cherry, and notes of cassis, all of which are dusted with powdery tannins that persist in the back palate. This wine has an excellent acid balance and a slate and graphite quality that is rarely found in Napa wine, making it remarkably distinct, even as it is delicious. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $105

2005 Kapcsándy Family Winery “State Lane Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Yountville, Napa
Inky, dark garnet in the glass, this wine (which contains 14% Merlot and 6% Cabernet Franc) has an arresting nose of slate, red berries, and cocoa powder aromas that all provide the sensation of being tightly wound, as if they could explode out of your glass at any moment. Perhaps they are precursors to the tensed muscle of the wine on the palate which displays an astonishingly earthy core of leather, pencil shavings, wet dirt and dark cherry fruit that compose with perfect diction an attack on everything you thought you knew about Napa Cabernet. Outstanding balance, panther-like tannins, and an awesome finish round out what is clearly one of the best Cabernets being produced in Napa today. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $150

2005 Kapcsándy Family Winery “Roberta’s Reserve″ Red Wine, Yountville, Napa
Deep, dark, ruby in color, this wine can be smelled in the glass from a yard away, so beautifully lush are its aromas of plums, molasses, and stewed black cherries. In the mouth it travels lithe as a dancer, but dark and exotic in mood, spinning flavors of black plum, black cherry, and rich pipe tobacco into a concoction that captivates the palate for minutes on end with each sip. Rich without being overblown, and lacking any of the sweetness that so often accompanies the quality of fruit displayed here, this wine may very well be the best Merlot (with about 9% Cabernet Franc) produced in the Napa valley, as well as the most distinctive. Outstanding and worth all the effort required to track down one of the (sold out) 1700 bottles made in this vintage. Score: between 9.5 and 10. Cost: $140

With a production of less than 3000 cases, these wines are mostly sold to mailing list customers, however they do also make their way to select retailers. Find Kapcsándy wines online, or sign up for their mailing list.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy&Acirc®

Napa has a way of turning modest dreams into major productions. Lou Kapcsándy and his wife Bobbie decided to retire to Napa mostly out of nostalgia for the picnics and wine tasting they used to do as a young married couple living in Sausalito. Forty years after the first of these romantic escapes, their retirement dream included only a little cottage with at most an acre or so of vines, so Lou could putter in the garage and make a barrel or two of wine from his backyard fruit.

Three years after the family, including their son Louis, made the first tour of the small cottages for sale in the valley, the family was harvesting fifteen and a half acres of Cabernet and Merlot to make the first vintage of what will undoubtedly be one of Napa’s top wines for the decades to come.

Perhaps Lou Kapcsándy’s shrewd eye for a good piece of ground can be blamed for turning a simple retirement dream into an entirely new career and a family obsession. Born and raised in Hungary, a young, immigrant Kapcsándy (pronounced cap-CHAN-dee) trained as a chemical engineer, spent some time in the military, and also as a pro football player before getting to know some scientists at Boeing and convincing them to let him build them a factory. A billion dollars of annual construction revenue later Kapcsándy knows how to size up a plot of land in more than one way. Along the way to building his company Kapcsándy had the chance to taste the 1961 vintage of Bordeaux, which immediately sparked an obsession with the region that led to annual pilgrimages for nearly 40 years. Kapcsándy has walked the vineyards of nearly every major chateau in the region, just as he now walks in his own vineyard every week.

All of which might explain why the Kapcsándy family happened upon a plot of land known as the State Lane vineyard, and promptly decided to get into the wine business in a serious way. Their vineyard, which retains its historical name based on its address at the corner of State Lane and Yountville Crossroads in Napa, was made famous by the Beringer Winery decades ago as the source for some of Beringer’s most prized vineyard designated fruit. The Beringer’s 40 year lease on the property had expired, but not before all the vines on the property had themselves succumbed to the predations of Phylloxera. Fairly neglected, and perhaps even partially forgotten, the vineyard represented an opportunity too good for the Kapcsándys to pass up.

Whenever someone takes over an historic vineyard in Napa, there’s a period of time when those familiar with it hold their breath. Like a new family buying an old, majestic house on the block, you never know whether they’re going to replace it with some modern monstrosity or refurbish it to the height of its glory.

By now, everyone in Yountville has breathed a sigh of relief. With the precision and aggressive timeline that no doubt characterized his work for decades before, Lou Kapcsándy ripped out all 15 acres of the beleaguered, Phylloxera infected rootstock and replanted the property in several blocks, each with rootstocks carefully matched to the several types of soil found on the property. In 9 short months, a brand new winery was also constructed, capable of shepherding the roughly 3000 cases the estate expects to produce safely from field to bottle.

The Kapcsándy Family Winery enlisted the help of Helen Turley and her husband John Wetlaufer to oversee the replanting of the vineyards and the first couple of vintages. Starting in 2005 the winemaking was transitioned to the team of Denis Malbec (cellar master of Chateau Latour) and Rob Lawson who spent 14 years as the head winemaker for the Napa Wine Company. Despite the caliber of their hired help, Kapcsándy Family Winery is run almost entirely by the family. Lou and his son Louis jointly make nearly every decision about all aspects of the winery’s operations (a natural extension of the partnership they began in 1999 when they started a wine importing business together), and the plan is for Louis to eventually take over winemaking duties, after some time working with Malbec and Lawson, and some hardcore enology courses at U.C. Davis. During harvest Lou drives the forklift and Louis drives the grape truck.

Like many of Napa’s top vineyards, the winegrowing and winemaking regimen at Kapcsándy is extremely rigorous — from the dense precision spacing of the vines, to the strict yield reduction and canopy management, to the dogmatic insistence on harvesting the grapes only at phenolic maturity (a measurement of the presence and concentration of compounds like anthocyanins and tannins). Grapes are hand picked, block by block, in multiple passes through the vineyard, and are completely destemmed before being sorted, painstakingly, berry by berry into the fermentation tanks. During this sorting process, which involves dozens of people, up to 15% of the grapes are removed due to imperfections. Fermentations take place with minimal fuss or intervention. The wines are bottled completely unfined and unfiltered after aging in 100% new French and Hungarian oak for approximately 20 months.

“I have no interest in fruit bombs. No interest in huge, in-your-face wines that lack a mid-palate or structure,” booms Lou when asked what he’s trying to do with his wines. “I’m trying to make great wines, which to mean mean wines that are distinct, approachable in their youth, but fundamentally structured to age for a long time. We′re not trying to imitate any specific wine, but we are inspired by the great vintages of Bordeaux, all of which — ‘61, ‘64, ‘70, ‘75, ‘78, ‘82 — were good when they were young.”

The influence of Bordeaux is clear in Kapcsándy wines, even from first sight of the atypically broad shouldered bottle (made from a mold that the French sold to the Italians and which somehow made its way to Mexico) which reminded Lou and Louis of Haut Brion. Yet while these wines are remarkable in their European styling, they also bulge with an intensity that can only come from Napa, and are all the more compelling for it.

Full disclosure: some of these wines were received as press samples.

TASTING NOTES:

2006 Kapcsándy Family Winery Rosé, Yountville, Napa
Pale peach in color, this wine smells headily like herbs, dry Autumn leaves, and oak. In the mouth it is thick and weighty, sitting on the tongue like a linebacker swaddled in fine silk. The creamy wine lacks the acidity and brightness I normally look for in pink wines, and as a result the spicy cedar, caramel, and red berry flavors don’t spark excitement as much as they just resonate with a low hum, and fade after time with a sigh. Made from 56% Cabernet Sauvignon, 40% Merlot and 4% Cabernet Franc. Score: around 8.5. Cost: $30

2005 Kapcsándy Family Winery “Estate Cuvee” Red Wine, Yountville, Napa
A cloudy, inky garnet color in the glass, this blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc has a rich, earthy nose of tobacco, dark espresso, and leather aromas that include a hint of sweet oak. In the mouth the wine immediately takes charge, sculpting a flavorful experience of well-oiled leather, blac&