Moving Day
Big news! Cornerstone Cellars is moving! We’re moving from our current address of 6505 Washington Street to our new address of 6505 Washington Street. Okay, that’s not very dramatic news as we are moving all of about twenty feet across the parking lot, but it’s big news for us and good news for you. We’re moving into the space right behind our current Yountville tasting room and will be closed from March 23rd to April 1st (no kidding) as we prepare an exciting new tasting experience for you in our beautiful new space.
On top of this there is truly exciting news for our old space as soon a dynamic new culinary partner will occupy our old tasting room featuring charcuterie, cheeses, bubbly and exclusive designer fashions and jewelry that you won’t be able to resist.
In addition to our exciting new neighbor, Cornerstone Cellars will be expanding our offerings from Yount Street Glass. Their handcrafted jewelry and gifts from recycled wine bottles could not be more fun or beautiful and we are excited that our new spacious tasting room will allow us to expand our offerings of their selections. With our new neighbors, more Yount Street Glass and an ever more exciting selection of wines from Cornerstone Cellars we are sure you won’t be able to resist visiting all of us in Yountville ever more than you do now.
While it’s true that you’ll have to walk a few more steps to get to Cornerstone Cellars, we know you’d find those few steps so entertaining you’ll never know you took them.
We can’t wait to welcome you to the new Cornerstone Cellars!
Evolution
2013 Cornerstone Cellars Napa Valley Merlot, Oakville Station Vineyard, Oakville AVA, White Label
Wine growing is an unending evolutionary process if you want to make great wine. You need to experience a vineyard over a number of harvests and then taste the wine as it develops over the years to really understand its true character. Only time can show you what a vineyard can deliver then you can decide if it merits the status of a single vineyard bottling. I've always felt the vineyard should convince me instead of me convincing the vineyard.
Over the last years we have been working with an elite set of Napa Valley vineyards that have clearly established themselves as worthy of that distinction:
- Kairos Vineyard on the edge of Oak Knoll and Coombsville
- Grigsby Vineyard in the Yountville AVA
- Oakville Station Vineyard in To Kalon
- Red Lake Vineyard on Howell Mountain
We are now confident enough in these vineyards to to begin the presentation of an exceptional group of single vineyard wines under the Cornerstone Cellars White Label. Our White Label will become synonymous with this group of distinctive vineyards, which will be introduced over the releases of the 2012, 2013 and 2014 vintages. Only a few hundred cases will be produced of each wine. Those wines will be:
- Cabernet Sauvignon, Kairos Vineyard, Napa Valley AVA $90 SRP
- Cabernet Sauvignon, Grigsby Vineyard, Yountville AVA $90 SRP
- Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville Station Vineyard, Oakville AVA $100 SRP
- Cabernet Sauvignon, Red Lake Vineyard, Howell Mountain AVA $100 SRP
- Merlot, Oakville Station, Oakville AVA $75 SRP
- Cabernet Franc, Oakville Station, Oakville AVA $80 SRP
- Syrah, Grigsby Vineyard, Yountville AVA $60 SRP
- The Cornerstone, Oakville Station, Oakville AVA $150 SRP
As a passionate believer in terroir and wines with a sense of place it has always been my vision to evolve our Napa Valley wines at Cornerstone Cellars and arrive at this point in time. While place has always been an obsession to those who love pinot noir (including me and why we are making wine in Oregon) there is an equally compelling argument that those with a passion for the classic Bordeaux varieties should also cling to that connection to the soil in their wines. For some reason terroir seems to be the property of Burgundy, Rhône and Piemontese varieties, but what is true for them is just as true for those who were born in Bordeaux. It matters where the fruit is grown.
I get why cabernet and merlot suffer from this prejudice. The world is covered with hundreds of thousands of acres of these varieties simply because they are famous and have shown easy adaptability to many climates and soils. Unlike varieties like pinot noir, nebbiolo and viognier they have proved able to produce vast oceans of industrial wines under their names as they are more forgiving in the vineyard and capable of producing massive crops of grapes.
It is my goal with these new wines to show there is a sense of place in the Napa Valley as compelling as any, anywhere. Many of the most expensive wines in the Napa Valley are totally devoid of terroir and I think that is wrong and a waste of some of the finest cabernet sauvignon dirt on the planet. It my own very small way I want to show that great Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon vineyards deserve as much respect as great vineyards everywhere. However as you would expect from Cornerstone Cellars these new wines are not boiled down concentrates that masquerade as wines, but elegant wines that allow the nuances and shades that these unique vineyards bestow on these wines to show themselves in all their glory.
Each of these new wines will have a reason to exist. That reason will be the vineyard itself. It will be my pleasure to introduce you to them. You will see the first release of these new single vineyard wines this September with the 2012 Cornerstone Cellars Merlot, Oakville Station. This will be followed by a complete rollout of the new wines in 2016 with the releases of the excellent 2013 vintage.
In addition to these limited production single vineyard wines we will continue to offer extraordinary values in our Black Label series, which will grow to include a merlot. We will also be introducing a new luxury cuvée with the 2012 vintage. I have named this new wine Michael's Cuvée in honor of our founder Dr. Michael Dragutsky, who launched Cornerstone Cellars in 1991. This wine will be exclusively selected from the same vineyards that give us our single vineyard wines and will combine the best characteristics of each vineyard to a whole that is truly the sum of all its parts.
So we continue to evolve at Cornerstone Cellars. Evolution is slow in the world of wine, unlike the tech world where iterations are a daily occurrence, in the world of agriculture we only get one harvest a year. With each vintage we take another step. We may progress one step at a time, but we know where we’re going.
$217 a Gallon for Grape Juice
Harvesting the Cornerstone Cellars To Kalon blocks at Oakville Station
A recent article on The Drinks Business quotes Tor Kenward saying he was paying $26,000 a ton for Beckstoffer To Kalon Cabernet Sauvignon fruit. That's $217 per gallon for grape juice or about $43 a bottle for just the grapes.
Certainly this is an extreme example, but it is symptomatic about what is happening in the Napa Valley. Over the last several years the prices of grapes has been moving inexorably higher with no signs of slowing down. The Napa Valley average for cabernet sauvignon now approaches $6,000 a ton and that's for the fruit you don't want. That average includes all the truckloads of grapes going to the big producers like Beringer and Mondavi. The grapes someone like me wants start at $7,500 a ton and moves up quickly for anything with a sub-appellation.
The old rule-of-thumb used to be that you could estimate the bottle price you needed to get to make money on your wine by from the cost of the fruit. For example pay $6,000 a ton and you would need to sell your wine at $60, pay $9,000 a ton and you would need to charge $90 a bottle. Estimating this way is surprisingly accurate.
The rising prices for cabernet sauvignon means that the ongoing squeezing out of non-Bordeaux grape varieties in the Napa Valley will only be accelerated. If you were a farmer would you plant a crop that brought in $28,000 an acre or $14,000 an acre, but cost you the same to produce?
You can see what road the Napa Valley is heading down. Before too long $100 a bottle will be the entry level Cabernet Sauvignon wines. This is very disconcerting for a winemaker whose goal in life to to have people drink their wines. I'm afraid soon they will only be wines for label drinkers not wine drinkers. A frustrating reality for someone who believes wines are for pleasure, not worship.
You can't argue with the numbers. It looks like its time to look beyond the Napa Valley for exceptional fruit sources. We've been in Oregon for years now, but that was for a different reason, as I felt California was not the place for the type of chardonnay and pinot noir I wanted to make. I went to Oregon for quality reasons not economic ones. Yet spending time in Oregon only reminds you how prices in the Napa Valley, for everything not just grapes, have passed into fantasy land.
All I'm looking to do is live in the real world of wine, where real people drink and enjoy my wines without having to feel guilty about how much they spent. More and more as I get older I seem drawn to simpler pleasures and the wines at my table more often than not come from places like Beaujolais, Chorey-les-Beaune, Côtes du Rhône, Corsica and Spain. Simply delicious wines that enhance my meals and my life without doing any damage to my conscience. That's not to say I don't love the great bottles when they come my way, but greatness is not defined by what the wine costs, but by how the wine tastes. The simple fact is that the most hyped and expensive wines in the world rarely live up to expectations and you can always, and I mean always, find wines from the same region that equal or exceed these unicorn wines in both quality and value.
To return to the example of the $217 a gallon grape juice, this liquid gold comes from To Kalon, which is more a district than a vineyard due to it huge size, some 690 acres. Compare that to Chambertin at 33.5 acres, Clos de Vougeot at 122 acres or even a big estate like Château Lafite Rothschild at 265 acres. At four tons an acre To Kalon would produce 2,760 tons of fruit, which would produce almost 2,000,000 bottles of wine. To Kalon is a blessed district producing some of the finest cabernet sauvignon in the world, but a rarity it is not.
So what does this mean for Cornerstone Cellars? First it means that we have to work harder than ever to ferret out those truly distinctive small blocks of vineyards owned by growers with more pride than ego. We have four such sites that are truly extraordinary: Oakville Station (which is actually in To Kalon), Red Lake on Howell Mountain, Grigsby in Yountville and Kairos on the edges of Oak Knoll and Coombsville. These vineyards are the cornerstone of our White Label selections. For our Black Label and Artist Series wines we are casting a wider net in order to find the finest vineyards regardless of appellation. Sonoma, El Dorado, Santa Barbara and on and on, the possibilities in California are almost without limit and we'll explore then all. No matter what we will continue our vision of making fresh, acid-driven wines that come to life on your palate.
After all, we may start out with grape juice, but what we end up with is very, very special and, in our case, very, very personal. Personal means personality and it means that Cornerstone is for pleasure, both yours and ours.
See you at the dinner table.
One Hundred Percent
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
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
Stunning twisting cloud formation at dawn over the Napa Valley vineyards of Yountville
Pre-Storm December Dawn Napa Valley
Stormy December dawn in the vineyards just east of Yountville in the Napa Valley
Giving Thanks: Napa Cab, Willamette Pinot
November in Oregon's Willamette Valley
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
Earthquake and a New Harvest
The Cornerstone Cellars 2013 vintage is somewhere in there.
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.
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.
