Colgin

The Kiss of Success

James Laube
Posted: August 22, 2000

Ann Colgin

Colgin

The Kiss of Success

Ann Colgin knows how to make an impression. She marks special occasions by "signing" the label of her Herb Lamb Vineyard Cabernet with a crimson kiss. "It started at a charity auction," she says. "An enthusiastic young couple who'd just bought my wine asked for an autograph. I kissed the label, and that became the official signature."

Wine and auction houses have always gone hand in hand for the 41-year-old native of Waco, Texas. After graduating from Vanderbilt University, she took an interest in wine while attending a Sotheby's course in London. "That was my introduction to quality wines," she says. "I grew up around cocktails and beer."

She began to really focus on wine after attending the 1988 Napa Valley Wine Auction with antiquities dealer Fred Schrader, her husband at the time. "We fell in love with the region and its wines,"she says. The couple's friendship with husband-and-wife winemaking team Helen Turley and John Wetlaufer inspired them to try to buy a vineyard.

Though no suitable properties were available, Turley's connections helped secure grapes from the Herb Lamb Vineyard, a 7-acre plot at the base of Howell Mountain, west of St. Helena. Colgin and Schrader put up the money, Turley did the winemaking, and the result has been an extraordinary success.

Rich and deeply concentrated, the Herb Lamb Cabernet routinely scores in the mid-90s. More than 4,000 people currently languish on the winery's waiting list. "The market has changed so much," says Colgin. "Interest is now so global, and there's such a frenzy to get small producers' wines."

Nonetheless, it hasn't always been smooth sailing for Colgin. The 1999 vintage of her Tychson Hill Cabernet, the debut bottling from a St. Helena property she purchased in 1996, was ruined by a blending mistake that occurred during fermentation at the custom crush facility where Colgin rents equipment. The vineyard had produced 150 cases, which would have been worth about $200,000.

Colgin has run the winery on her own since she and Schrader divorced, in 1997, and she couldn't help but be enticed by the property once owned by Josephine Tychson, one of California's first female winemakers and the founder of Freemark Abbey. "Tychson is especially interesting because she was a very young woman with two children when her husband died, and she was able to do some remarkable things," Colgin says.

Colgin hopes to build on her own remarkable success and increase her production. She will release a 1999 Bordeaux-style blend of grapes purchased from highly respected vineyard manager David Abreu, and the Tychson Hill Cabernet should eventually yield another 400 cases.

-- D.S.

Colgin
St. Helena, Napa Valley
Founded: 1992
Owner: Ann Colgin
Winemaker: Mark Aubert

94 Colgin Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley Herb Lamb Vineyard 1996

Release Price: $110
Current Auction Average: $474
Production: 225 cases

Big, ripe, rich and beefy, in a high-extract style delivering currant, bay leaf, black cherry and tar notes, this is complex, concentrated and firmly tannic, holding its focus. Best from 2001 through 2010.

-- J.L.