William Cole - Don't Blink, you'll miss it!

William Cole Winery is easy to miss in both the literal and figurative sense. Heading North along St. Helena Highway, we kept checking our GPS to make sure we hadn’t passed the unmarked road to William Cole, one of the oldest wineries in Napa Valley. With only five acres of land and a production limited to 500 cases of wine per year, (most purchased by private colelctors, baseball players and the like) few people are familiar with William Cole, but those who have tasted the ruby red Cabernet are fanatics. The only SF restaurant that currently lists William Cole on its menu is Gary Danko - and it is rumored that they are often out of stock! Our private guide for the intimate visit admitted that he hadn’t planned to pursue a career in guest relations for a winery, yet during a serendipitous lunch at Auberge de Soleil, he had the rare opportunity to taste William Cole wine and became so enamored that he made it his goal to one day work for the winemaker.
The tour was short and sweet, since the winery itself was “boutique”, a PC way of saying, teeny tiny. Apparently, Napa law states that a winery must have a minimum 10 acres to be considered a Commercial Winery. However, William Ballentine was so intent on growing cabernet grapes on the former JC Weinberger Winery (also the first female-owned winery in Napa), that he petitioned to get Napa to make an amendment stating that you must sit on 10 acres of land to be a Commercial Winery – unless - you are the First winery. Built in 1876, the historic winery was apparently the first in St. Helena, and so it is now both the winery and residence of the Ballentine family, who are third generation St. Helenans.

As we arrived, we met Bill in person, and he couldn’t be more salt-of-the earth, stopping to chat with us and introducing us to his son Cole (hence the William Cole name). We strolled through the tasting room, where historic memorabilia and black and white photos from the old JC Weinberger winery had been collected from various shops and businesses throughout town and then made our way into the wine cellar and cave. Since William Cole is such a limited production business, Bill Ballentine is the only person who touches the wine, from the vineyards to the bottle. Bill’s palette is storied to be so sensitive that he can tell if a piece of beef has been sitting next to chicken at the butcher shop even after it has been cooked. William Cole’s 2.5 acres of cabernet grapes are separated and barrel aged by the 5 lots that they grow on and then blended together after being carefully tasted by Bill (sometimes with input from his teenage daughter Claire, the namesake of William Cole’s Cuvee Claire). Though the grapes are all cabernet, the wine is designated a cuvee due to the great variety between the five lots.

Tasting Notes:

William Cole Claire Cuvee – 2006:
We began the tour of the wine cave with a taste of the William Cole 2006 Cabernet Cuvee, which had been decanted that morning prior to our arrival. The 2006 was everything I had been promised it would be – so big and rich, that I expected to feel an equally strong punch of tannins, yet the finish felt like a satiny, silky sheet on my mouth. The wine was full of dark fruit, ripe blueberries, and blackberry juice, with hints of smoky fig and black pepper – a complex wine that I look forward to tasting again in a few years.

William Cole Claire Cuvee – 2001:
We finished the tour seated around the tasting table with a second visit from Bill, for a taste of the decanted 2001 vintage Cabernet. The 2001 contrasted dramatically from the 2006 – and was bold, smoky and meaty. It was full of oak, and earthier than the 2006, with ripe cherries and leather.

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Quintessa: The Quintessential Winery Experience

Quintessa Wine Estate in St. Helena, is beautifully crafted facility that is as environmentally friendly, technologically cutting edge, yet charming in a timeless, classic sense. The crescent shaped winery comes into view as you drive up to the tasting room, which actually sits above the winemaking caves and facilities, blending seamlessly in with its surroundings. The elegant structure was designed to be environmentally sensitive and is pressed compactly against the hillside, so as not to disrupt the natural flow and beauty of the property.

I really enjoyed the full tour and tasting experience at Quintessa. The tour begins with a leisurely stroll through the vineyards around the property, which is surrounded by rolling hills, a lake, and embodies a diversity of soil types, and microclimates. The walking tour really allows you to be mindful of Napa Valley’s indigenous natural beauty – both the flora and the fauna are lovely, from the moss-covered oak trees to the birds that alight on the small lake.

The winery itself is impressive from a design standpoint, created to facilitate a gravity-flow wine making process and outfitted with custom-designed stainless steel tanks sized to match the different blocks in the Quintessa vineyard. When the grapes are harvested, they are brought to the “roof” of the winery, which is level with the tasting room. Here the grapes are sorted and de-stemmed before making their way to the stainless steel or french oak fermentation tanks in the winery below. The beauty of the sustainable design is that the roof can then be water-blasted clean with hoses and air-dried by the Napa sun. Below the roof, inside the cavernous winery of Quintessa, a glass blending room and lab overlooks the tanks. Here, the winemaking progress is monitored daily.



The tasting room itself is opulent and refined in contrast to the high-tech winemaking facilities. Garrett and I and our two guests sat down to a sumptuous tasting spread with beautifully prepared canapés including a delectable mushroom tart tp compliment the tast. Our guide generously poured us a “taste” of two different vintages of the Quintessa Meritage Blend– the 2000 and the 2001. It was incredible how different the wines tasted, and I am attributing this to the fact that the Quintessa Meritage blends the property’s various blocks of grapes which are all influences by different soil, microclimates and other variables, which undoubtedly change from year to year. After we finished our comparison, our guide proceeded to refill our glasses with our preferred wine so we could finish our canapés and enjoy each other’s company…which, while it seemed like a fabulous gesture in the moment, led to an afternoon doze at Duckhorn later that afternoon…but I’ll save that for another post!

Quintessa 2001: Incredible, rich flavors, lots of berry fruit balanced with a rich buttery chocolate silken finish. A soft, luscious wine.

Quintessa 2000: Full of dark berry flavors and a sweet, but more forward with a powerful nose of currant and spice. The tannins pack a strong punch, but are balanced, giving the wine a long, elegant finish.

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HALL Rutherford - A Work of Art

I have been to HALL Rutherford five times and it never ceases to impress me with its stunning beauty, timeless modern art collection, top-notch hospitality, and most breathtaking wine cave I have ever seen. While most Napa visitors are familiar with the St. Helena Hall Tasting Room located centrally along the St. Helena Highway, a visit to HALL Rutherford evokes a completely different experience. Located on the same winding road as the famed and ever-elegant, Auberge de Soleil, HALL Rutherford can be visited by appointment only and one must gain admittance through the gated entrance. The Winery and Tasting Room are located on the same property as one of the Hall Family residences, so you truly feel like a guest of the family as you are welcomed to the property.

The tour begins in the Tasting Room, which resembles a luxurious private guest house, with the exception that is loaded with world-class modern art, has a stunning outdoor patio complete with wood-fired pizza oven, and sits atop a

winery and wine cave that are

unparalleled in style and technology. Guests are welcomed at the front door with a chilled glass of Sauvignon Blanc and invited to enjoy the art work and view from the patio. Photos of Ambassador Kathryn and Craig Hall pictured with various celebrities and dignitaries pepper the walls and an architectural model of renowned artist Frank Gehry’s new design for the Hall St. Helena Winery assure you that you are a guest of highly cultured, worldly patrons and supporters of the arts and humanity.

The boutique HALL Rutherford Winery, completed in March 2005, was custom designed by an Austrian designer with no detail spared. The unique hexagonal tanks are so beautifully crafted that they can almost be mistaken for as part of the collection of art that line the caves. Hall Rutherford harvests only a small portion of their grapes, is dedicated to making single vineyard and limited-production wines. Juice from the crush is gravity-fed into the fermentation tanks then into the art-lined caves for barrel aging.

At HALL Rutherford, art is ubiquitous - the statue of a flying couple on the patio, the glowing star mobile hanging above the tanks, the enormous butterfly out in the vineyard… But arguably the most dazzling piece of artwork on the property is the magnificent, shimmering chandelier in the Tasting Cave above the King Table. The chandelier was designed by Donald Lipski, who previously designed the chandelier at Grand Central Station, and, after being commissioned by Mr. Hall, designed this custom chandelier to resemble the root system of a grape vine. The chandelier is enhanced by 1500 glistening Swarovski crystals, paying homage to Ambassador Kathryn Hall’s Austrian Heritage.

I’m not sure if sitting down to a tasting in such a regally adorned cave has anything to do with it, but every time I taste a Hall wine, it tastes like liquid gold. Some of my favorites to try:

Kathryn Hall Cabernet: 2006: Aptly names after the Ambassador, this is a very special wine. It is dark and as smooth as silk, peppered with spice and even earthy notes of sage and mushroom.
Hall Sauvignon Blanc 2008: Crisp and full of citrus, with hints of grapefruit, lemon and pineapple. The wine also exudes stone minerality at the finish.

Hall Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon 2006: This wine is perfect on its own with a nice

long finish. It is powerful and full-bodied, with rich mocha and anise adding spice to the fruit-forward stone fruit flavors.

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Palatial Palmaz - An Epic Winery Experience

A wrong turn on the way to Palmaz in Napa did nothing

to dampen a peerless experienc

e Garrett and I experienced this weekend at this monumental winery, which houses an 18-story wine cave, and an intricate gravity flow system. The experience was magnificen

t and flawless – yet despite the grandiosity of it all, the Palmaz family still managed to maintain a warm, hospitable aura at their 600 acre winery. Nestled above Napa Valley Country Club, Palmaz Winery is built into Mount George, a mountain with dramatic volcanic rock formations jutting out amidst the vineyards and brush. After an unassuming road along the estate to the tasting room, we followed

a steep stone pathway, cut beautifully from the excavated rock from Mount George, to the fourth floor where the grapes begin their fermentation process and where we would embark on an astonishing tour and tasting. At the apex of the stairs, which overlooked the valley below, Jessica Palmaz was awaiting us. As we chatted with Jessica, the birdsong was interrupted with the whirl of a little white Turbo Carrera Porsche that breezed up in front of the tasting room and hastily ejected a Chanel-purse clad, sunglass-wearing matron. “That’s my Mother in law, Amalia” Jessica mentioned as we started toward the tasting room and cave. “She makes our family meal every day”. The beauty in this winery is that as palatial as it is, the winery is

still run by Amalia and Julio Palmaz, their Daughter, Florencia Palmas, son, Christian Palmaz and his wife, Jessica Palmaz, giving visitor’s the sense that they are visiting an old family friend rather than assuming the spectator’s role.

Dr. Julio Palmaz, who, on a side note, invented the Palmaz Coronary Stent, purchased the winery in 1997, after moving from Argentina for a medical residency at U.C. Davis, where his interest in wine was ignited. Taking time to find the perfect piece of terroir for his

retirement project, Julio Palmaz finally came across the abandoned 600 acre Napa estate, then known as Cedar Knoll, built in 1896. The state had no vineyards or winery - although it did have a “wine tunnel” that ran underneath the house. After purchasing the property, the Palmaz family excavated Mount George behind the estate, creating the grandiose winery, which officially opened in 2003. Dr. Palmaz did not want to waste the precious vineyard space, and hence the stacked design of the caves.

The beautiful and Spanish-inspired winery entrance does little to prepare the visitor for the awe-inspiring interior of Palmaz. Beautifully constructed; the central feature of the winery is a massive self-supporting dome, with a wagon-wheel design of wine caves that spiraling outward from the main dome.

The tasting level of the winery is also the location where the wines begin their gentle journey towards the barrel and then the bottle. After being picked (about 50% of the vineyards’ total yield that is), the Palmaz grapes make their way to a conveyor belt-free crusher-stemmer machine that allows workers to gently pluck out the less tha

n perfect grapes from before the machine lightly crushest them (just enough to break the skin) and releases them through the Level 4 hatch into the tanks below. The cave boasts two dramatic floors of spotless stainless steel tanks circling the dome’s perimeter on a hidden carousel. Floor 3 holds 24 beautiful tanks holding 1500 – 1800 gallons of wine, while floor 2 holds 12 larger tanks, which hold 2600 gallons of wine and are used primarily for blending. These fermentation tanks are one half inch thick and filled with glycol, which is an incredible conductor of heat and cold. A massive controlling-device on Floor4, (which looks like a giant remote control), adjusts the heat for each tank individually, heating or cooling the tanks as necessary to control the speed of fermentation. Before the wine is barreled, it is separated into two parts: The free-run juice and press juice – which is the top, solid portion of the wine that floats to the top of the wine tanks and is relegated to a bladder press to be “gently” pressed. The bladder press is like hybrid mix of a bladder and a cement truck. The wine solids are placed in the round press, which inflates like a balloon in the center, pressing the wine gently against the walls of the press to squeeze out the precious juice. Then the entire press rotates, like a cement truck, to move the solids around and capture the remaining juices. The wine is then barelled, using nitrogen to siphon

off the barrels so as not to allow any oxygen to make contact with and contaminate the carefully handled wine.

Standing at the bottom of the dome of the Palmaz cave reminded of being in a massive submarine or deep inside the bowels of The Titanic, although maybe I just had the feeling that we were embarking on a journey and I was in over my head. As we made our way through some of the spiraling caves, we noticed the single-racked barrels. Jessica explained that the Palmaz winemakers (Tina Mitchell and Mia Klein) believe in aging every barrel on an individual basis. Each barrel is tasted and evaluated separately and even aged in different coopered barrels, creating “the winemaker’s spice rack” to add subtle flavors to each year’s vintage.

Back at the tasting room, the dining table was elegantly set for Garrett and I but could have seated a feast for 15. I complimented what I thought were Venetian glass water mugs at each setting and Jessica corrected me, saying that she just couldn’t stand the idea of a communal “dump bucket”. Needless to say, none of our five generous tastings o

f Palmaz wine went into our elegant individual “dump buckets”!

The Whites:
We started the tasting with the 2008 Riesling, paired with a star-shaped crostini, the size of a quarter, topped with smoked salmon. The Riesling was subtle and pleasantly floral on the nose with strong notes of apricot and rose, a perfect compliment to the smoked salmon. Next, we tasted the 2008 Chardonnay, which tasted more like a White Burgundy, as it was less buttery and oaky due to the malolactic fermentation. It was agin subtle, not overpowering, with hints of green apple and strawberry and mild vanilla from the French Oak. Served with a piave sheep’s milk gouda, the chardonnay grew nutty and rich.

The Reds:
We did a two vintage perspective on the Palmaz Cabernet – 2006 and 2005. The 2006 Cab was a silky treat, with bold punch of mocha and cherry and vanilla and completely fruit forward. The 2005 was still a bit tight with noticeable acidity. I still enjoyed the dark fruit flavor, and lots of spicy herbal notes, namely cloves, and ginger. These wines were paired with salted dark chocolate nibs and if the bottles didn’t set us back $100 each, I would have purchased an entire case.

Dessert:
The 2007 Muscat was a smooth, clean dessert wine, lacking the typical viscosity of syrupy dessert wines. It was tropical with hints of pineapple and peach and kiwi, and paired perfectly with the shar-shaped shortbread cookie topped with a goat-cheese mango-almond mixture.

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