napa valley

A few days after our dinner at Melba’s, we reached out to Deneen Brown, CEO of Brown Estate, to talk about the House of Brown range and what looks to us like smart ways to reach a new generation of wine drinkers while retaining longtime fans.

Hope Goldie, whose chemist father made wine at home in Washington, studied enology and food science at UC-Davis and worked at Opus One, Stags’ Leap and Rutherford Hill Winery before joining Darioush in 2005. She has held various winemaking jobs there, from enologist to assistant winemaker to director of winemaking and, now, vice president of winemaking. John met her earlier this year during the Wine Writers’ Symposium at Meadowood Napa Valley. She is charming, funny and deeply knowledgeable, so we were eager to catch up and ask her some questions, including the simplest: Why Viognier? While it’s widely planted around the world, especially in the Rhône Valley, where it’s especially famous in Condrieu, it’s fairly unusual in the U.S. and even more unusual in Napa Valley, especially as a stand-alone varietal. In 2023, there were 2,555 acres of Viognier in California and 88,063 acres of Chardonnay, according to the California Grape Acreage Report. And last year, the report noted, there were only 117 acres of Viognier in Napa compared to 22,945 of Cabernet Sauvignon.

...we identified six of Napa's iconic family-owned wineries and vineyards established in the 1970s and 1980s that have significant next-generation involvement. We sent an invitation to the founding owners and their children asking them to participate in a conversation about their "Generational Transition," and the career paths of the children who have become involved. We also asked their advice for those who might be considering a generational transition.

We were at the final dinner of the 2024 Wine Writers Symposium in Napa recently when we met Jerry Seps, pioneering founder and winemaker of much-awarded Storybook Mountain Vineyards Winery, north of Calistoga. We thanked him for his work in ZAP, Zinfandel Advocates & Producers, which has kept one of our favorite grapes and early loves in the public eye for decades.

MFEO isn’t an acronym we toss around lightly. To be perfectly honest, we’d never even heard of MFEO until we watched one of Dottie’s all-time favorite movies, “Sleepless in Seattle,” which was, to his ever-lasting regret, brought to her attention by John. She could watch it every night. The right people end up together because they were: Made For Each Other.

Jill Klein Matthiasson and Steve Matthiasson, of Matthiasson Wines in Napa, were MFEO.

Grape Collective talks with Emmanuel Kemiji about his winemaking journey and his passion for Spanish wine.

Dan Petroski, winemaker and owner of Massican, which makes only whites in Napa Valley, has one of the most fertile minds we’ve come across in our 50 years of enjoying and studying wine. But when we heard about his latest project, even we had to say: What the Falanghina? Essentially, the idea is this: What if he asked other vintners to create a wine that would fit under the Massican style umbrella? Considering that winemakers have such individual passions, this seems a bit out there.

We were recently gifted Napa: Behind the Bottle, a wonderful book of photographs in which Bill Tucker depicts the owners, winemakers, and workers of Napa's iconic family wineries and vineyards at the end of the 20th century. The first of these photographs are of Robert and Margrit Mondavi.

(Corison Winery, Napa, courtesy of Cathy Corison, the first woman winemaker/proprietor in Napa Valley. Photo credit: Bob McClenahan Photography)

The Mondavis are legends in the development of the California wine industry. Robert is viewed by many as instrumental in putting Napa Valley on its path to greatness, and both Margrit and Robert were known for the artistic sensibility that enveloped their love of wine, food, and the arts. In her preface to Napa: Behind the Bottle, Margrit noted that "This book is a collection of the passionate, good people that made the Napa Valley famous for its great wineries. Looking at these amazing faces, you understand that as Robert Mondavi said, 'Making good wine is a skill. Fine wine is an art.'" The "good people" photographed by Bill Tucker were associated with Napa's top wineries, as is further evidenced by their inclusion in James Laube's Wine Spectator's California Wine (1999) and Jim Gordon's Opus Vino (2010).

The Case Study

In light of the recent attention being given to changes in Napa Valley, we used the 87 wineries in Tucker's book as the basis for a case study of (a) wineries that have had a change in ownership since 2000, (b) who now owns these wineries, and (c) which of these wineries currently have a winemaker who is a woman.

We found that 83 (95%) of these wineries were independently family-owned in 2000, and in most cases by the founding family owners. By 2022, 64 (74%) of the wineries were still owned by the same family. Thus, 19 wineries (22%) had experienced a change in ownership since 2000 and are...