Napa Valley Harvest 2024 Trip

Just got back from a trip to Napa over the end of last week. Napa was beautiful as always with wonderful weather and great hospitality. We went to six wineries and several great restaurants.

Before getting into individual wineries there are a few take home things that Nick and I discussed that you might find interesting. First, we went to 3 of the best rated regular (non-Michelin) restaurants in the heart of Napa and while the food was as good as we remembered we realized that it really didn't stand out anymore compared to what we get locally in LR. That realization really made us really happy.

Next, Napa has gotten too expensive and everyone in the wine tourism biz there knows it and is unhappy about it and they are down >30% on visitors this year. Several things are afoot to try to remedy this issue.

Last, and oddest was that I saw more big pick up trucks (with obligatory mud on them) there than fancy sports cars. Also, country music seemed to be everywhere. Napa felt more country land baron bougie than tech bro posh this time which was just entirely unexpected. It may have just been that we were there during harvest or something but definitely a subtly different vibe.

This trip we went to Blankiet, Schrader, Covert, Domaine Carneros, Paul Hobbs, and Promontory.

At Blankiet we did a comparative Left Bank Bordeaux tasting with their proprietary red and Mythicvs wines. It was small, very personal and Claude Blankiet, the owner, even came down and sat down and drank and ate with us for nearly an hour. Wonderful experience and exceptionally great wines.

At Schrader we focused on different clones of Cab Sav and went back into their library to show how different clones have different unique characteristics that interact with terroir uniquely and age differently. This tasting was to help us understand how they think about wine and get our palates attuned to their different offerings so we could make choices that resonate with us moving forward. This was an intense tasting where the host pulled feedback from us while we tasted and questioned our assumptions and showed us flaws in our thinking about different wines. I learned more in 3 hours than I typically would in months reading about wine.

Covert was an add in our driver suggested as we had time to kill and it was a lovely place with wines that I think would resonate with people who really love the plush, ripe fruit forward Napa style. The biggest interest here for me was that they had a clone 341 Cab Sav bottling which I didn't know was planted anywhere in America. The espresso and dark chocolate on the finish of the 341 blew us away.

Domaine Carneros was, in a way, a let down. The sparkling wines were delicious (especially their Le Reve series) but we were just anonymous guests at an anonymous table and it had no education component. Also, several people were trying to film videos of themselves and it was annoying. I think it was influencers because they just kept on and kept on.

Paul Hobbs blew us away. Paul Hobbs is a legend but I didn't actually know his story and knowing it changes how I look at his wines. His Beckstoffer Las Piedras and Beckstoffer Dr. Crane were thrilling and will be our source for these two vineyards moving forward. We also got to try his HOBBS super high end cuvee which was the most expensive wine I've ever had ($850/bottle) and it was amazing. I'm thankful to Paul's high end client who came in the day before us who they opened that bottle for because it wouldn't have been opened for us. I'll take the day old dregs of a wine that fancy any day!

Last was Promontory and I struggle to accurately describe the facility or the wine. It was a serious, masculine, industrial, stoic, Zen-like space. It was the kind of place where you were scared to speak too loudly and break the silence and it was set on a cliff overlooking a hidden valley in Napa where almost everything you could see was untouched wilderness. And, the wine was the most singular Cabernet Sauvignon I've ever experienced. If a wine can taste like a cool, dense and dewy forest with scattered red berry and black current bushes that had a sharp cold wind blowing through it then that's what it tasted like. It honestly defied any existing category of Cab I've had. I do think this style will be the future of the varietal that everyone will be scrabbling to imitate in the near future though. Just weightless, ethereal and beautiful. Below are a couple pics I took at the Promontory winery.