Press

Can you recommend a good red wine at around $20 a bottle? That question comes up over and over again, not just for wine columnists but for retailers, too. Mike Rose, the owner of Bogey’s Bottled Goods in Southold, N.Y., told me it was one of his most frequently fielded requests.

What exactly is a “hot” brand? Is it one that sees astronomical sales growth? (And in this sales environment?) Is it a label that looks good? Makes the consumer say “wow”? Should it mean only small brands?

This year we found out that “hot” meant a wine that got the industry itself excited. From a fully hand-made ocean-influenced sparkling wine, to a carbonic Pinot Noir, and even an orange wine that made this jaded editor reconsider her position on the style, the wines we featured this year are those that had the trade talking.

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.

Ninety-nine point nine nine percent of writers don’t make a lot of money. So one of the sweetest rewards of this vocation is the research part – getting to spend time with an interview subject, visiting their hometown perhaps, or chatting with them over a cup of coffee at their favorite local greasy spoon. It’s the casual moments spent between two strangers engaged in this quasi-journalistic undertaking that can be revelatory, that adds the real human bits to the writing.

Given that I write about wine all day, all night, my own dinner table is often scattered with bottles that tell an array of fascinating family stories. Some inspiring, some scandalous, some delicious, some meh. On the inspiring and delicious front, two Napa Valley winemakers, Chris Phelps and his son Josh—are crushing it.