Newcomers In Cabernet Country

Eight Napa Valley wineries bolt out of the gate with quality

Posted: November 15, 2008

CORRA
The 100-percent solution
Celia Welch Masyczek started her label in 2004, focusing on Cabernet and Sauvignon Blanc. She's hardly a newcomer, though, having made brilliant wines at premier Napa estates such as Staglin, Scarecrow, D.R. Stephens, Rocca and Hartwell over the course of her 26 years in the wine business. With Corra, Masyczek, 48, started small, with only one barrel of Sauvignon Blanc and 11 of Cabernet Sauvignon, but it was enough to get her off and running. Corra is the Celtic goddess of prophecy, who often appeared in the form of a crane (depicted on the label), and the name celebrates the winemaker's Irish heritage.

While the 2004 Cabernet (91 points, $125) came from a Beckstoffer-owned vineyard in St. Helena, those vines were pulled after that harvest. For the 2005 (93, $125), Masyczek used grapes from Lake Hennessy-Pritchard Hill; in 2006 and 2007, she added fruit from Oakville and Rutherford. An early tasting of the 2006 suggests it is the best of the first three vintages, showing tremendous depth and structure; the 2007, while very young, is also impressive. For 2008, she is buying a total of 6 tons of grapes from those same areas: Pritchard Hill's Sage Hill and Rutherford's Boschwitz Vineyard, close to Scarecrow and Rubicon in Oakville. She crushes the wines separately, blending once she has a read on quality and how the blend will work, which can take months.

The Sage Hill fruit gives the blend its intensity and tannic backbone, she says, supplementing the purer valley-floor grapes from Oakville and Rutherford, which offer the loamier currant, herb and anise-olive quality typical of those areas. The Corra style is ripe but also marked by elegance and finesse, with alcohols falling into the 14.5 to 15.2 percent range.

"All of the best wines I've made have been 100 percent Cabernet," muses Masyczek. She makes her wines at Keever in Yountville, another client. —J.L.

DANCING HARES
Bordeaux blends from Howell Mountain
When husband-and-wife team Paula Brooks and Bob Cook retired early after successful careers in the high-tech world, they moved to Palm Springs to play golf. But they were soon bored. "We looked at each other and said, 'We don't like golf,'" Brooks remembers.

Although they may not have seen themselves as vintners originally, they knew they wanted a life in Napa after visiting friends there. In 1997, they purchased a 31-acre property at the foot of Howell Mountain, and, within two years, their business sense had them planning—and planting—their own wine venture, Dancing Hares. "We're risk takers: It's in our DNA," Brooks says.

Dancing Hares Napa Valley 2005 (92 points, $85) is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot and Cabernet Franc from the couple's 5-acre vineyard at the foot of Howell Mountain. Production is approximately 400 cases, all from estate grapes.

Their previous life, near Washington, D.C., was faster-paced. Cook, 67, owned a handful of infrastructure software companies, and Brooks, 61, was an entrepreneur who specialized in database software. Both loved wine, and collected it for years. When it came to their own wine label, they hired what Cook dubs their "dream team": top vineyard manager David Abreu, winemaker Andy Erickson (Screaming Eagle, Ovid) and consultant Michel Rolland.

The label is named after a 3-foot-tall Sophie Ryder sculpture that Brooks first saw and fell in love with 15 years ago; she eventually purchased a 15-foot version of the piece, which sits on their Napa property. The couple also operates Mad Hatter, a second label produced from wine that doesn't make the cut for Dancing Hares. The Mad Hatter Napa Valley 2005 (90, $55) is a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot from their vineyard.

The couple have embraced their new role as vintners and settled into the Napa community, but they remain involved in philanthropic work. In 1993, Cook endowed the Robert E. Cook Honors College at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, his alma mater. Though they might sound busy between the winery and philanthropic endeavors, Brooks insists, "We enjoy the flow of the season, and we've slowed down." —MaryAnn Worobiec

FUTO
Reviving a prime Oakville vineyard
Tom Futo is shy and private. Perhaps one day he will be more voluble about his Cabernet. But for now, despite his initial success, he's cautious. "I've seen too many one-hit wonders," he says.

The 2005 (96 points, $200) is amazingly plush and concentrated, bold and extracted, a tour de force, yet for all its power, intensity, depth and persistence, it's very elegant and stylish. "I'll have more confidence if we can pull it off year after year," he says while giving a tour of his property, which has 11 acres of Cabernet. "We found a great spot here in the middle of the beauty of this valley."

Futo, 59, and his wife, Kyle, 56, bought the former Oakford Vineyard property in 2004. The vineyard is on Oakville Grade, in the hills above Far Niente and next door to Harlan Estate. The land is a mix of rolling slopes and rocky, well-drained soil that Futo is fine-tuning, working with the old Oakford Vineyard and replanting parts of the property. David Abreu is his vineyard manager.

A resident of Wichita, Kan., for part of the year, Futo is a financial investor who first started buying and trading stocks at age 13. "When you're 13 you think you know everything, and then you find out you don't," he says. And there are parallels between investing and wine, in terms of both risk and the variables one confronts.When he and Kyle started thinking about making wine, they considered Oregon, for Pinot Noir, but eventually homed in on Napa Valley and were fortunate to find such a great site for sale. The Oakford Cabernets were very good to outstanding in quality (the last one I reviewed, the 2001, hit 93 points), so the potential is there and has been achieved in many vintages.

As a consumer, Futo became a fan of winemaker Mark Aubert's work with Peter Michael (Les Pavots Knights Valley Cabernet) and Colgin wines, and has hired Aubert to make the wine. Aubert's touch shows in the young wines' polish, plushness and rich layers of flavor. —J.L.

GRASSI
Home-grown success
Twenty-five years ago, Mark Grassi was at a crossroad. He was nurturing his interest in wine by taking night classes in viticulture, but working as a carpenter during the day. "I had to make a decision: wine or construction," he recalls. At the time, he chose construction. These days, he no longer has to choose between the two; his construction company is successful and his inaugural wine, the Grassi Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2005 (91 points, $60), is an elegant and refined red with fresh and vibrant flavors.

With the decision to focus on construction, Grassi started his own Napa-based company, Grassi & Associates, in 1989. But he never strayed far from his love of wine, working on wineries for Screaming Eagle, Ovid, Cade and others. He also built homes for vintners such as Tim Mondavi, Jayson Pahlmeyer and Francis Ford Coppola.

In 1989, Grassi, now 52, and his wife, Jami, purchased a 6-acre property in Napa's Soda Canyon neighborhood at the base of Atlas Peak, where they built their home. He says vineyards have always fascinated him, so he planted 4 acres to Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot in 2002, with help from Mary Maher, vineyard manager at Harlan.

Grassi has lived in Napa for 28 years and dabbled in home winemaking during that time. He says he is finally ready to make the leap into making wine commercially. "I wanted to lay the foundation for eventually leaving the construction business," Grassi explains.

Grassi chose winemaker Peter Franus, a close friend who has made Cabernet under his own label since the mid '90s. While Grassi stays involved with the winemaking and continues to run his construction company, he feels the pull of the vineyard most strongly. "I like the viticulture side, worrying in the spring when it gets too cold, worrying in the fall that it's going to rain, trying to out-think Mother Nature," he says. —M.W.

LEVY & MCCLELLAN
Making a statement with quality and price
Bob Levy and Martha McClellan Levy didn't pull any punches when they set out to make a Cabernet Sauvignon from their vineyard west of Calistoga. Nor were they shy about pricing.

The deeply flavored 2004 Levy & McClellan (95 points, $350) joined the ranks of Napa's elite in quality and price; only Screaming Eagle at $750 and Harlan at $450 are more expensive. No other California wine has debuted with so high a price tag. Still, the wine sold out.

The Levy-McClellan team knows a thing or two about both wine and marketing. He is the winemaker for Harlan and Bond; she is winemaker for Sloan and Blankiet (with 2006). The Harlan, Sloan and L & M Cabernets show a stylistic similarity; all are very ripe, extracted, plush in texture and body.

Levy, 53, and McClellan, 44, bought their site in 1999 and planted it that year, only to be forced to pull the 6 acres of vines due to disease and replant it in 2002. They skipped 2003 because of variable quality—"It just didn't work," says Levy—and then hit it right with 2004. The property, off Petrified Forest Road northwest of Calistoga, is removed from the valley floor. It's a rocky, low-vigor site in which the vines form small, loose clusters of tiny berries, according to Levy. The vines produced very ripe wines, which is usual for infant vines, he adds. But what's unusual is the softness and richness of the tannins; young vines often produce more tannic wines. The young L&M Cabernets offer lots of dark rich fruit, but also a hint of forest floor; as the vines mature, the couple expects an earthy minerality from the volcanic soils to emerge in the wines.

Levy is optimist about the 2005, 2006 and 2007 vintages as well, favoring if ever so slightly 2005 and 2007, as they offer more flesh and body. The 2004 is a flamboyant debut that mirrors the Harlan and Sloan styles of dense, ripe opulent fruit. —J.L.

OVID
The cutting edge on Pritchard Hill
Ovid is a spectacular new winery in Napa Valley's Pritchard Hill area, situated on a steep winding road that some refer to as the Rodeo Drive of Napa. This area, in the eastern hills overlooking Oakville, is home to several showcase estates, including Bryant Family, Chappellet, Colgin and Versant, with more wine estates on the drawing boards.

Owners Dana Johnson, 48, and Mark Nelson, 49, came to Napa from New York in 1998, lured in part by Napa's milder winters but also by its wines, and one wine in particular, Dalla Valle Maya.

"We became convinced [our] site was ideal for wine grapes," Johnson says, citing one of their favorite wines, the Dalla Valle Maya, a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grown in a vineyard below their property.

Today the couple own 300 acres, 15 of which contain vines that were planted in 2000. Vineyard guru David Abreu designed and oversaw the mix of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon (about 9 acres) and Cabernet Franc (about 4 acres), with lesser amounts of Malbec and Petit Verdot. The winemaker is Andy Erickson, one of the hottest names in winemaking circles since signing on to make Screaming Eagle, while globe-circling French enologist Michel Rolland acts as a consultant. Managing partner Janet Pagano was appointed in 2006, the indistry veteran having contributed to the project since its inception.

Johnson and Nelson built their ultramodern winery into the hillside, at an elevation of 1,400 feet, moving huge boulders and burrowing into the rocky hill for the cellar floor and caves. The facility, named after the classical Roman poet, is as cutting-edge as it gets, with sorting tables, 3- and 4-ton concrete vats, wooden fermentation casks and modern architecture. (Concrete fermentation tanks are common in many of the wine regions, but not California.)

"I was scared to death to put red wine in [concrete]," Erickson confesses, admitting he feared the cement might impart a dusty, concrete character. But the winemaking team toured Bordeaux and found that concrete fermentors are preferred over stainless steel at many estates, including Château Pétrus.

Concrete functions like wood, Erickson says, but allows for darker, more stabilized colors in the young wines, along with more intensity of flavor yet softer tannins. The wines are cold-soaked for five to seven days, then whole-berry fermented using native yeasts. The tanks are punched down manually.

Experimental wines were made in 2003 and 2004. "They were good wines," Johnson says, "but you can really tell the difference with 2005." Adds Erickson, "We could tell the vines had established themselves [by 2005] and were really happy." The 2005 (94 points, $175) shows they're on the right track, combining ripe, rich layers of fruit with excellent structure and balance. —J.L.

SEVEN STONES
Rock-solid route to quality
Seven Stones is a massive, tangled, 100,000-pound granite sculpture mined from a quarry near Yosemite National Park and assembled in the middle of its namesake vineyard.

Ronald, 76, and Anita Wornick, 72, love art and music as well as wine, so the Richard Deutsch work holds a prominent place on their 45-acre property. But wine is the main reason they live in Napa Valley, and their tiny 1-acre Cabernet vineyard (soon to be 2 acres) is yielding some extraordinary wine.

The Wornicks bought the property (once owned by Bill Harlan) above the Meadowood Resort in 1995, bringing Ron full circle from a childhood aptitude test that indicated he was best suited for being a farmer. He first pursued a career as a musician, then worked stints with Chiquita Banana, Clorox and his own firm, the Wornick Co., which created the modern military rations MREs (meals ready to eat), before easing into wine.

The Wornicks retired in 1998 and now spend part of their year in Napa, where Ron oversees the winery. "It's practically a religious experience, watching the vineyards grow," he says enthusiastically. David Abreu planted the vineyard, and the Wornicks' son, Kenneth, made homemade wines. "The wines my son made were pretty good," Ron says "You could see their flaws, but you could also see the potential."

The refinement in winemaking shows, as Seven Stones 2005 (94 points, $175) showcases amazingly rich and pure Cabernet fruit, with dark berry and mocha scents and full, lush tannins. The 2006 is a shade tighter, but a similarly brilliant effort. The 2007, taking a little from both 2005 and 2006, is a superrich rendition, very intense yet very polished, with a strong currant-graphite edge.

Aaron Pott now oversees winemaking in a tiny boutique winery with the goal, Wornick says, of "separating anything that gets in the way of perfection." Production will grow to 400 or 500 cases as the second acre begins to bear fruit. —J.L.

STEPHANIE
One vineyard, two winemakers
A vineyard owner hiring two winemakers to make two different sets of wines from the same vineyard might seem like a strange idea. But Stanley and Helen Cheng—who have already established a name for themselves among Napa Valley Cabernets with Hestan, crafted by winemaker Mark Herold—did just that. They hired another winemaker, Jeff Gaffner, to launch a new label called Stephanie, named after their daughter, which focuses on a more elegant expression of Cabernet Sauvignon, Bordeaux-style blends and Merlot from their estate vineyard in Napa's Coombsville region.

Here's how it works: Winemakers have their own blocks from the 41-acre vineyard to work with. They pick the grapes at different times, use different extraction techniques and different blends. The results show each winemaker's interpretation of Cabernet. The Hestan wines tend to be rich and extracted. But Stephanie's inaugural lineup, comprising the Napa Valley 2005 (93 points, $60), a blend of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petit Verdot, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Malbec, and the Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley 2005 (93, $45), shows balanced, proportioned and elegant winemaking.

The Hestan label debuted in 2002. The Chengs were first introduced to Merus, a Napa Cabernet label founded by Herold, while dining at the French Laundry, and subsequently hired him as a consulting winemaker. The Chengs hired Gaffner after trying some Merlot he made from a neighboring vineyard; the Stephanie label debuted with the 2005 vintage.

Gaffner was chosen as winemaker for Stephanie in part because his approach involves using a range of Bordeaux grape varieties to craft the wines. His experience with this style stems from his early career at Chateau St. Jean, where he helped make the Bordeaux-style blend Cinq Cépages. Gaffner also makes a Cabernet Sauvignon-based blend for Xtant, in addition to Pinot Noir for Black Kite, and Zinfandel, Syrah and Sémillon for his own label, Saxon Brown.

Gaffner views the 40-acre estate vineyard, planted soon after the Chengs purchased the land in 1996, as a "whole spice cabinet of ingredients to work with." It is planted in 24 blocks. In the end, Gaffner says he achieves a more delicate, more elegant style wine than Herold. "We come to different conclusions from the same vineyard," Gaffner says. —M.W.