One Hundred Percent

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2012 Cornerstone Cellars Cabernet Franc Black Label

We believe in the power of blending the classic Bordeaux varieties for the same reason the French do: it makes the wines better. Cabernet provides the power and structure, merlot texture and aromatics and cabernet franc is a bit like MSG as it lifts, brightens and adds excitement to the wine. This blending process is an important part of what we do at Cornerstone Cellars.

Well most of the time. The fact is the 2012 Cornerstone Cellars Cabernet Franc Black Label, Napa Valley is one hundred percent cabernet franc. We did not plan it that way, but the wine insisted and it's our job to listen to what the wine has to say, not tell it what to do.

Blending trial after blending trial ended up the same way with the unblended Cabernet Franc being the winner. There was simply nothing this cabernet franc needed so we decided to do exactly that - nothing.

Cabernet franc and the warm, long 2012 vintage were made for each other. The perfect fall weather allowed the grapes to ripen slowly at the end, coasting in to full ripeness without losing the natural herbal edge that defines cabernet franc. The result is a wine with the richness of Napa Valley that is still lifted, bright and mouthwatering.

While this wine is one hundred percent cabernet franc, it is still a blend as we have combined fruit from three exceptional vineyards for our Black Label Cabernet Franc and each of them add something special: Our Oakville Station Vineyard in To Kalon adds depth, power and a velvety texture; the Talcott Vineyard in St. Helena gives structure and richness; the Carrefour Vineyard in Coombsville brings lift, freshness and classic cabernet franc aromatics. Together they create something very, very special.

The Pineapple Express Arrives in the Napa Valley

The arrival of a storm brings welcome rain and beauty to the Napa Valley

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Clouds at dawn signal the arrival of the "Pineapple Express in the Napa Valley. Soon the spring mustard and the vines will get a good drink

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Stunning twisting cloud formation at dawn over the Napa Valley vineyards of Yountville

Giving Thanks: Napa Cab, Willamette Pinot

Just in time for Thanksgiving I’m excited to share my new Cornerstone Oregon releases with you. Certainly there is no better match for the traditional cuisine of this American holiday than wines from America’s premiere pinot noir and chardonnay region: Oregon. With the 2014 vintage I passed my first decade making wine in Oregon and I am more convinced than ever that it is here in the United States that pinot and chardonnay can best show their true personality.

For this reason at Cornerstone Cellars we do not make any chardonnay or pinot in California as, while there are a few examples of wines that are true to these varieties, the vast majority of wines produced in California from pinot and chardonnay speak far more of winemaking than terroir. I believe in pinot and chardonnay grown in the Willamette Valley just as fervently as I do in cabernets, merlot, syrah and sauvignon blanc grown in the Napa Valley.

Very soon Cornerstone Oregon will be at the same production level as Cornerstone Cellars in the Napa Valley (about 5,000 cases each) and so these wines are of the highest priority to me.

As from the beginning of Cornerstone Oregon in 2007, our wines are a collaboration between myself and my friend and the Northwest’s premiere winemaker, Tony Rynders. The style of Cornerstone Oregon reflects my over three decade immersion in the wines of Burgundy and Tony’s two decades in the Northwest, which includes stints as the red wine winemaker at Hogue and a decade as winemaker at Domaine Serene. The wines of Cornerstone Oregon are a synthesis of our perspectives and together we are crafting wines with a classic structure intertwined with a vibrant New World personality. As always, all of the wines of Cornerstone Oregon are grown, produced and bottled in Oregon.

This Thanksgiving I am giving thanks for the privlege of making cabernet in the Napa Valley and pinot noir and chardonnay in the Willamette Valley. Certainly this is having the best of both worlds.

Isn't That the Point

It very strange how in winemaking you can end up at the same point in very, very different ways. "It is important to understand that a point is not a thing, but a place," notes the Math Open Reference. The point we are always trying to achieve is a pure expression of our three "V's": vintage, variety and vineyard.

To achieve this with varieties as transparent as chardonnay and pinot noir takes a clear vision of where you are going. To arrive at the same point in winemaking is not to make carbon copies vintage-to-vintage, but to arrive at the place you feel each vintage is taking you. Patient, careful winemaking allows wines of very different vintages to arrive at the place, the point, you are seeking as a winemaker. To arrive at this point you have to let the wine achieve its own natural balance for the year that created it. So in some years you have structured wines and in others a more natural richness and forward personality. Just because they are different does not mean they have not arrived at the exact point you are trying to achieve.

Two such vintages are 2011 and 2012 in Oregon's Willamette Valley. In 2011 rain and cool weather made fruit sorting an art form if you wanted to make exceptional wines. We rejected bin after bin and individually sorted and selected each bunch that made it into the fermenters. The end result speaks for itself in the beautifully lifted and structured 2011 Cornerstone Oregon Willamette Valley Pinot Noir, White Label. The wines from this year are naturally tight and are only now starting to reveal their delicate layers of complexity. As someone who cut their pinot noir teeth on Burgundy I particularly love this wine. Then there was the sunny, gentle 2012 vintage where there was hardly a thing to sort. In fact, the 2012 chardonnay fruit was the most beautiful and defect free I've ever seen in Oregon. The 2012 Cornerstone Oregon, Willamette Valley Chardonnay, White Label reflects this generous vintage, not by being soft, but with a rounded firmness that will develop for years to come. I think this is a perfect example of the extraordinary potential of chardonnay in Oregon and why I am convinced this is the best region for chardonnay in North America.

It is exciting to release such a distinct range of personalities with our Cornerstone Oregon releases this fall. For me such differences are the things that make wine so exciting and pleasurable. After all, isn't that the point.

Napa Valley November Sunset

Quite a view from my office at Cornerstone Cellars in Yountville

Fall Napa Valley

Stunning November dawn in the Napa Valley today

Earthquake and a New Harvest

In the pitch darkness of your deepest sleep a nightmare suddenly launches your bed into the air jarring you awake. But waking only makes it worse as you realize that it was not a dream, but reality that launched your bed off the ground. But that's just the beginning as your entire house has been tossed in the air. Even beyond that you finally understand it's not just the bed, nor the house that has been flipped into the air, but the very ground itself.

Before your can fully comprehend what has happened it's over and everyone is holding each other trying to regain some sort of belief that the floor beneath their feet has become something that you can actually stand on. Then the adrenaline hits and you spring into action. That action mostly involves mops, brooms and dealing with the shock. For the next eight hours we cleaned, first our house, then repeating the experience at our Cornerstone Cellars tasting room in Yountville. By noon we had the worst of the mess cleaned up. We were spattered with wine like we'd been working crush all day and our hands were filled with small cuts from all the shards of glass that covered everything.

That's an earthquake. A few minutes of terror followed by hours of the most mundane, yet adrenalin fueled housecleaning you can imagine. After a few minutes, through the daze of shock, it occurs to you, you may have lost a year of your life, perhaps more. Could the entire vintage be gone? Could all of our wine be gone?

Through the haze of shock and exhaustion the harsh reality starts to sink in. It did not really hit until later in the day, when I was asked about our wines and suddenly tears started to well in my eyes as if the potential loss was just too much to ever consider. We started out in 2007 to make wines with what we perceive as refinement, balance and elegance. Achieving the style of wines you want is not an overnight thing. In winemaking you only get one learning experience a year. The 2013s were not the result of just one year of work, but the result of six years of work. When you lose a vintage you don't just lose the wine from that year, you lose the wine you achieved through a lifetime of experience. For a small producer like us, the wines change each year influenced by the weather and our increased knowledge of each vineyard and the fruit that comes from it. When you make wines that are not manipulated you literally only make that wine once in your life as each year is unique. Not only does the weather change, but you change. So whatever wine we lose will be losing something truly unique. The intersection of nature and humans at one point in time.

A week has now passed and with each day you get a little less jumpy. The aftershocks continue and we even slept through a 3.2 quake last night. However, we still don't know the extent of the wine we lost. A few more days will tell the story. We have been lucky so far only suffering broken wine bottles, minor cuts, smashed dishes and jangled nerves. At this point I am clinging to the hope that our luck will continue as we dig our barrels out of the confused pile the once orderly barrel room has become.

With harvest upon us we are experiencing death and birth at the same time. While we have certainly lost some of our work from the 2013 vintage forever, the hope and excitement of a new vintage is also upon us. As forward is the only direction we can go we are choosing to focus on what are about to create rather than what has been destroyed. It's time to celebrate the new vintage not mourn for the old one.

I believe this will be an exceptional vintage in the Napa Valley, perhaps the Earth itself thinks so too.

A Beautiful Factory

It was majestic, breathtaking. It cost tens of millions of dollars. It was the most beautiful factory I'd ever seen. Such are the temples of wine in the Napa Valley. Shrines to people rather than agriculture. The days of Bottle Shock have long passed to be replaced by sticker shock. The Napa Valley is no longer the place a farmer can bring his winemaking dream to reality.

Today in the Napa Valley people build pyramids to their own memories just as the pharaohs did in ancient Egypt - and for the same reason. Immortality is expensive. Making wine is farming and it's hard to think of anything less glamorous. The choice for the ages is obvious - temples last longer than wines.

I was visiting one of Napa's new pyramids a few weeks ago and it was perfection. Majestic floor to ceiling windows filled with vineyard views, a winemaking facility loaded with the cutting edge technology and, of course, it was all integrated with equally cutting edge modern art. There was only one thing missing. There was no soul, no soul of the wine and no tie to the land. The connection to the land was lost as everything about the place was about people - nothing was about nature and dirt, which was nowhere to be seen except through perfectly clean, massive windows. It was there to see, but there was nothing to touch or that could touch you.

You can buy the land, the equipment, the art and the media, but in the end the wines will have no soul, no soil, unless it is really inside of you. Without that soul, no matter how much you spend, you just end up with a beautiful factory and like all factories you pump out an industrial product. Designer wines designed for points not people.

The marketing employed to sell these wines is as cold as the facility they're made in. Data points replace people and social media becomes a strategy not a conversation. You don't want to get your hands dirty.

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Corison Winery

On Route 29 in the heart of the Napa Valley is a plain gray barn where the wine, and only the wine, tells the story. There Cathy Corison has endured the pointless point-ridden decades for wine when only points mattered and pH did not. Today she has been magically rediscovered without changing a thing. It seems actually having a vision and a passion, not simply an ego and a bottomless checking account, have become fashionable again. This, at least, is something we can be thankful for in the Napa Valley

There are real wine temples, like that plain gray barn, out there in the the Napa Valley and across California, but as in Indiana Jones, you'd better choose wisely. Most people choose poorly forgetting that it's in the cup of a carpenter that you're more likely to find real wine.

In Spite of the Fact...

Chardonnay, Napa Valley, Yountville 8/9/14. Beautiful in spite of the fact this is no place to grow chardonnay.

August Napa Valley

August dawn Napa Valley Yountville AVA

Veraison

Yountville cabernet sauvignon 7/24/14

Willy Wonka, Chocolate and Wine Tasting

I taste our wines frequently, often three or more times every week. More often then not they taste slightly different to me each time. Actually that's not correct, so let me rephrase that. It's actually me that's tasting them slightly differently each time. I know these wines in a way no one outside the winery could. This kind of repeated exposure to the same wine is something only someone who makes them experiences.

That's the reality of the situation. We are not tasting machines pumping out precise data to a perfectly calibrated computer. The world we live in changes our ability to taste. The time of day, environment, who we are with, our mood, health, food, temperature and an endless array of variables impacts the way we perceive a wine. Most of the time, unless a wine has been damaged, the variations winemakers see as they taste and re-taste their own wines is not any change in the wine itself, but a change in the taster.

So taste and wine is moving target. Someone who assigns a score to a wine after just a quick tasting reflects more the momentary situation of the taster than the true state of the wine. When you see only one frame of a movie you can never hope to understand the whole story.

What this means for a winery is that getting scores from critics is a crap shoot unless you make them in a big, sweet, fat oaky, high alcohol style, which is the only thing that they can taste when hammering through dozens if not hundreds of samples. Obviously the public's bullshit meter is not very sensitive because they continue to buy this obvious manipulation of the system. Hey buddy, would you like to buy a bridge....

Any taste scientist will tell you that those that claim they can taste and accurately rank to the precise point are just fooling themselves. It is simply not possible for humans to taste at this level - and they can prove it. You can bet that Robert Parker, James Laube and their like will never let the accuracy of their palates be put to a scientific test. Would you? Having to focus an a few key points is the only way to pump scores out when tasting dozens or even hundreds of wines. This dumbs wine down.

The 20th Anniversary of The French Laundry here in Yountville was a big event bringing in culinary luminaries from around the globe. As part of the celebration Thomas Keller teamed up with Mast Brothers Chocolates to produce a special dark chocolate bar to celebrate the anniversary. In four of the bars are "Golden Tickets", a la Willy Wonka, which entitle the winner to a dinner for two at The French Laundry. The only restriction is that you have to live in Yountville to buy one of these potentially golden bars, as you might expect from Thomas Keller, all the proceeds go to charity. As a Yountville resident I could not pass up that chance. I did not win the dinner, but that first taste of this amazing chocolate was almost knee-buckling in the intensity of the taste experience. Each time over the last few days I have returned to that bar of Mast Brothers chocolate for my daily ration and each bite has been a delight, even a revelation, but the mind expanding intensity of that first taste is gone, never to be repeated. That is the fleeting nature of the tasting experience, there is that one brief moment to experience something in a totally new way and then that opportunity is gone forever. Our taste experience moves forward in perfect rhythm with our environment, our knowledge and expectations. We have as much impact on our perception of taste as the product we are actually tasting.

The only way to take the true measure of a wine with any complexity is to spend time with it. Conveniently this is actually what wine is made for - taking time.

First Light

First light in vineyards, Yountville, Napa Valley 7/1/14

Sizing Up

Cabernet sauvignon sizing up Yountville Napa Valley 6/29/14

Being Franc

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2011 Cornerstone Napa Valley Cabernet Franc, Black Label Stepping Stone Cuvée 

Every vineyard, vintage and variety has its center. It's our job as winemakers to find that center and let it speak through the wine. If you think I feel there is Zen in crafting a wine you'd be right. When you find that center the wine truly has not only something to say, but something worth listening to.

This is why Cornerstone Napa Valley Cabernet Franc is so distinctive. We let it be Franc. Many wineries seem to want to tame the cantankerous cabernet franc's edgy personality, but we don't. In fact, we revel in its idiosyncrasies. Being Franc is everything to us.

Where is cabernet franc's center? For me it a little on the wild side, sauvage, as the French call it. Not wild like crazy, but like nature. Cabernet franc should have an edge aromatically showing wild herbs and mint and a firm structure that grabs your attention. Like most really interesting things, it's not for everyone. Perhaps that what we like about it as we freely admit we are not trying to make wines for everybody.

Finding cabernet franc in the Napa valley is not easy and, unfortunately, expensive. We have been fortunate to find some amazing sites that allow us to weave the diverse characters of vineyards in St. Helena, Oakville, Coombsville and Carneros into a wine that embraces its Franc-ness. A dollop of spicy merlot from Carneros rounds out the texture and expands the aromatics with the herbal touch of merlot from a cool site echoing the sauvage of the cabernet franc itself. The fresh acidity lifts and separates each aspect of the wine allowing it to be voluptuous, yet finely balanced. This is a full figured Napa beauty that displays all of its seductive charms while never losing its elegance or firmness. I don't know if we make a sexier wine.

Just a note on the vintage, there have been a lot of knocks from the press on the 2011 vintage in the Napa Valley, proving once again a little bit of knowledge can be dangerous. The fact is if you took the weather we had in 2011 and gave it to Bordeaux they would be drinking Champagne and slapping themselves on the back. The only people that had trouble with this vintage are those winemakers dreaming of making big-point-fruit-bombs by picking at brix levels approaching thirty. Winemakers that were looking to harvest ripe grapes, as compared to overripe ultra-hang time fruit, cruised through the vintage just fine. A case in point being our 2011 Cornerstone Napa Valley Cabernet Franc, Black Label Stepping Stone Cuvée.

We believe we have found our center with the 2011 Cornerstone Napa Valley Cabernet Franc, Black Label Stepping Stone Cuvée by being willing to let franc be franc. We hope you will take the time to enjoy this wine in a state of mindfulness. Being Franc requires concentration.

Adding Fuel to the Fire

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Me pouring Cornerstone Oregon at World of Pinot Noir

Sometimes a pat on the  back also gives you a kick in the butt. It never hurts to have some fuel tossed on the the fire of the passion you are pursuing. That is how I feel about Alder Yarrow's article about me and Cornerstone Cellars on Vinography - fired up.

I knew going in it would be a challenge to market Napa Valley wines made in a more elegant style. Certainly it would have been easier to just make a massive wine, slathering on oak and alcohol in a style many critics adore, but where is the pleasure in making wines you don't like to drink?

When we started releasing our more restrained style of Napa Valley wines we took our lumps from Laube and Parker, which, proudly puts us in a sort of elite club with some very fine winemakers whose vision we share. However, rejection by the old boys club has been more than countered by the likes of this exciting article in Vinography and excellent reviews in Connoisseurs Guide to California Wines, The Wine Enthusiast, Stephen Tanzer and a host of wine bloggers. 

It's easy to make wines that get big points from the old guard, you can hire a consulting company that guarantees results point-wise (do they charge by the point?). But is it really easier? Does scamming the system just to get those points really bring you satisfaction? Maybe for some, but not for me. 

What brings me satisfaction is tasting a wine we created and having it excite and thrill, well, me. What brings me even more satisfaction is seeing someone else have that experience too.

It also brings true satisfaction to have someone I respect as much as Alder write such a, for me, moving article on the work we are doing at Cornerstone Cellars. Please take the time to read his article at the link below.

Click here to read the Vinography article 

“Cornerstone continues to evolve, but like the rapidly shortening line of a tether ball accelerating towards the pole, the wines of Cornerstone are beginning to gravitate towards a quality and consistency that is quite admirable, and the equal of any of Napa’s stalwart producers. Camp and Keene seem to be laying the foundation for becoming a fixture in the valley. Their Yountville tasting room has already become one of the town’s most visited, and thanks to Camp, the winery has quickly become among the most successful industry players in social media and new internet technologies such as geofencing.”

— Alder Yarrow in Vinography

Spring 2014 Cabernet Leaf

Old vineyard near Yountville Napa Valley

Fruit Set 2014 Napa Valley

Old vineyard near Yountville Napa Valley late May