Press

It's 8 p.m. on a summer night at St. Helena's Crane park, and the balls are rolling.

The name of the game is bocce. The teams battling it out, at least on this court, are the Sand Crabs—so named, apparently, because when you play bocce you sort of shuffle along like a crab before you bowl — and Balls on Ya. The overhead lights are bright; with 17 teams on eight courts, there are a hundred people here, easy, mostly in the wine business in one way or another.

Wineries like Beaulieu Vineyard and Robert Mondavi are reliable, well-known sources for quality Napa Cabernet. Here, Beaulieu’s 2019 is fresh, direct and focused with red currant and cherry coulis notes that mingle with floral and tobacco accents. Robert Mondavi’s appellation bottling leans on the winery’s Oakville vineyards for half of the blend, yielding a solid Cabernet with a core of dark fruit, along with cedar and warm stone notes.

A relatively new name among the category's leading wines is Grounded Wine Co. Winemaker Josh Phelps fermented his Cabernet in steel, and left the juice on the skin for three weeks before aging it in French oak barrels, 40 percent of which were new. The result is a lively Cabernet with red and dark fruit flavors underscored by a bramble note.

This pair’s professional interaction differs from that of many generational winemakers—where father passes craft and technique onto son (or daughter). Instead, they meld contrasting skill sets, which—paradoxically, though synergistically—strengthens their growing presence within the western U.S. wine sector.