Winery: Heitz

Vintage: 1989

Region: Napa Valley

Vineyard: Martha’s Vineyard

Varietal: Cabernet Sauvignon

Average Price: $100

Tasting Notes and thoughts: I’ve finally found a way my palate and Napa Cabernet can get along without the slightest hint of trouble. Age, this is the key to a peaceful cohabitation. The more I drink well made Napa Cabernets with 10+ years of age the more I find these often top heavy and brooding wines to find a perfect balance and dare I say “elegance”

On the nose this wine shows an intoxicating array of ripe fruits and secondary aromas primarily of black cherry, black berry, black olive, leather and a hint of oak spice. The palate is loaded with more juicy black fruits, as well as plumb skin. A touch of sweet leather and oak add a wonderful charm to this wine.

Rating: 3.5 tastevins (food wine, sit down, classic wine)

“When I told my dad we were going to take the company organic,” says Mark Neal, “he drove over to Sonoma and came back with a tray of rotten apples and peaches and said, ‘this is how our grapes will look when you grow organic.’”

Not to be dissuaded, Mark initiated the transition of vineyards owned or managed by Jack Neal & Son – established in 1968, and at nearly 1,900 acres, the largest single vineyard management company in Napa Valley – from conventional to organic grape growing in 1984. Jack Neal passed away in 1994, but not before seeing most of their vineyards accredited by California Certified Organic Farmers (i.e. CCOF) by 1991.

Today, with over 1,800 acres of vineyards fully certified, Jack Neal & Son is by far the largest grower of organic wine grapes in Napa Valley. About 1% of these grapes go into wines bottled under the family’s own label, Neal Family Vineyards (the winery established on Howell Mountain in 2001). Otherwise, the Neals work vineyards for no less than 60 growers, supplying grapes to some 72 wineries.

The sheer size of the Neals’ operation begs the questions: can any vineyard in Napa Valley be farmed organically; and if so, why not? AppellationAmerican.com currently puts the total acreage of grapes planted in the Napa Valley AVA at 43,000; just over 7% of which now has some sort of organic or Biodynamic® certification. “I honestly don’t know exactly why more growers in Napa Valley aren’t organic,” says Neal. It can’t be the cost, because when Mark Neal tracked eight of his vineyards transitioning from conventional to organic farming between 2005 and 2008, he found that “in seven of the eight ranches, the costs of organic farming were lower than conventional farming by an average of $6,000… the ‘high cost’ of organic farming is a myth.”

I spent more time with Julie Johnson at her CCOF certified Tres Sabores than any other single winemaker during a recent three week swing through the West Coast this past spring. Why? Admittedly, because I can drink her wines all day or night, everyday. Also, because everything she does, as a grower and winemaker, just seems to make sense. My vinous sensibility is simpático with Tres Sabores.

Johnson farms a 32 year-old vineyard in the heart of the Napa Valley’s famed Rutherford AVA; originally planted to Zinfandel (making killer reds), but to which she added two acres of Cabernet Sauvignon (yielding no more than a couple hundred cases a year) after first acquiring the property in 1987. As a former partner at Frog’s Leap, her instincts were, and still are, organic, but for all the right reasons: this vineyard is also her home, her refuge, her sustenance, and an extension of herself – everything in its place, but in the opposite of a contrived, unnatural fashion.

“The essence of sustainability,” she says, “is that no part of what you do is wholly separate from the other.” So, through Johnson’s windows, you see old, gnarly trunked vines, but also stands of walnut and 150 year old olive trees, zinnias and cosmos among the buckwheat and wild grasses between the rows, tangled blackberry patches around the edges, hummingbirds, bees, sheep, and furtive jackrabbits and noisy, wild guinea hens nesting or scrambling hither and yon.

Winery: Modus Operandi

Vintage: 2006

Appellation: Napa Valley AVA

Varietal: Cabernet Sauvignon

Winemaker: Jason Moore

Oak: 100% French Oak

Average Price: $65