“Cathy Corison is my heroine. She makes such great wine - the essence of Napa Valley minus the bludgeoning force, plus a sensible price tag.”
WINEMAKING
Cathy has long known that she can’t make a wine any better than the grapes that come into the winery at harvest, so all year she spends most of her time and energy out in the vineyards. Grapegrowing and winemaking are a seamless continuum.
The Power of Cabernet
Our goal is to make Cabernet Sauvignon that is both powerful and elegant. Cabernet Sauvignon makes powerful wine no matter where, or how, it grows. For Cathy, it is much more interesting at the intersection with elegance, a seeming opposite. To do this, we source our Cabernet from alluvial Benchland between Rutherford and St. Helena where there are gravelly loam soils. This allows enough water in the soil for healthy summer growth, but the vines run dry at just the right time for ideal fruit ripening. A huge diurnal shift in temperature, with hot days and cold nights, promotes inky color, snappy natural acidity, and rich complexity of fresh fruit flavors.
Throughout the growing season we are careful to balance the vine vigor and crop, which requires meticulous handwork. Careful canopy management to optimize the air and light that reach the clusters yields fully ripe fruit that retains bright acidity at moderate sugar levels.
We pick early, allowing the grapes to express the full spectrum of Cabernet fruit flavors from cherries and blueberries, through plums, cassis, and blackberries. Ample, velvety tannins give the wines gentle grip, which, combined with the firm acidity, allow the wines to grace the table and enjoy remarkable longevity.
Our winemaking is largely traditional and non-interventionist, with gentleness at every step. Everything we do is geared toward extracting all the goodness from the grapes and leaving anything undesirable behind. When fermentation is complete, the wines go down to small French oak barrels to spend the next 20 months undergoing the magical alchemy that is aging. We do our best to stay out of the wines’ way to allow it to speak of time and place.