A Tale of Two Wineries, One Coming Up and the Other Coming Back

Building a winery’s image from scratch is simple compared to the problems faced in improving a winery’s image from the dregs.

With no albatross to explain away, the new winery is free to release only its best wines, spend money on an attractive label and a well-regarded wine maker and shoot for recognition based solely on the wines’ quality.

A winery that has had public image problems, however, literally leaves a bad taste in the mouths of many, and that recollection keeps buyers away for years, sometimes decades, until by the passage of time the image improves.

As case examples of these two types of wineries I take Sinskey and Inglenook. The former is a new brand with no negative baggage, but a fine label, a great wine maker with a track record, a national sales manager with a decade of experience and an owner with the financial wherewithal and the desire to make great wine.

Restoring Once-Lustrous Image

Inglenook, one of the most revered names in the history of American wine, on the other hand, made great wine since its founding in 1879, but lost its lustrous image two decades ago, and repairing that broken picture has fallen to president Dennis Fife and wine maker John Richburg.

After a decade in the slums as far as image is concerned, Inglenook is making a dramatic but little-publicized comeback to the greatness it once shared with brother winery Beaulieu and a very few other wineries in the Napa Valley.

Last week I met with Fife and Richburg to discuss Inglenook’s second release of its Reunion red wine, and as I drove down Highway 29 toward the winery at the southern end of the valley, it dawned on me that in the previous three weeks I had had half a dozen Inglenook wines that had been very impressive.

For a winery that makes 125,000 cases of wine, this is an achievement. Ah, but you must be thinking, they must make more wine than that; it’s everywhere. True, the name Inglenook does appear on some 7 million cases of wine, but that’s where the image took a shot to the head.

Parent company Heublein chose in the early 1970s to use the Inglenook name for a line of inexpensive, blended wines called Navalle, a hybrid word, the Na coming from Napa and the valle coming from valley. This wine was sold in restaurants and on airplanes in those funny-shaped, screw-cap bottles. It was, to be charitable, awful.

(By 1987, Heublein Wines, now owned by Grand Metropolitan of Great Britain, included not only BV but also Almaden, and the combined wineries made more than 18 million cases of wine, ranking Heublein second in the nation in production to Gallo.)

As the Navalle line pumped out carloads of profit-making plonk, the parent company paid less attention than it should have on historic, old Inglenook in the Napa Valley. Things that should have been done weren’t, leaving the wines in disarray, some remaining solid values, others deteriorating.

And as a corollary to Murphy’s Law states, when something goes wrong, a whole lot of other stuff goes wrong, too.

“Not only did we have the Navalle line, but so many of our vineyards were very old,” said Fife, “and the drought (1976-1977) was the last straw for our old vineyards. They couldn’t survive that.” The vines nearly died.

Winery in Turmoil

They had to be torn out and replanted, but then nemetodes (a vine pest) were discovered, so the soil had to be treated and left fallow for an additional year. Add to that the three years it takes for new vines to produce a crop and you have a winery in turmoil through 1983.

By coincidence, that was the year Heublein reorganized its wine division and gave Fife the power and finances to make major decisions, and it was then that Richburg got his chance to shine as a wine maker, with new fermentation and aging facilities, new barrels and more equipment and assistants.

Also, Fife and Richburg took the step, which they felt necessary, to change the name of the winery to Inglenook-Napa Valley, which gives you the impression they see the major difference between their property and the wines emanating largely from the San Joaquin Valley that say Navalle on them.

It was with the wines of the 1981 vintage that I began seeing a turnaround at Inglenook, and that comeback continues with the release of the ’84 Reunion, a wine that sells for $35 and which brings together the three original vineyards of Inglenook’s founder, Gustave Niebaum, who made classic Bordeaux-style wine from them before Prohibition.

Reunion first was made in 1983, and the wine was hard and unyielding, typical of the vintage, but the ’84 is a much more supple and classically styled wine, with a violet and mint aroma. The wine is awfully young at present and decanting helped open it up, revealing rich, concentrated fruit that will carry the wine many years in the bottle.

Reunion was designated Cabernet Sauvignon in 1984, but the ’84 and succeeding vintages will be simply Reunion, meaning that if Richburg wants, at some point, to blend in more than 25% of Merlot or Cabernet Franc, he’ll be able to do so to make a better wine.

If Reunion were the only improved wine in the Inglenook line, I wouldn’t have spent time writing this. The fact is that so many wines at Inglenook are impressive these days, it’s a wonder wine shops aren’t inundated with demands. The ogre of image then rears its head.

Try, for example, Inglenook’s superb 1986 Gravion ($9.50), a blend of Sauvignon Blanc and Semillon that finished at the top of a huge group of Semillons I tasted blind some months ago. The wine is barrel-fermented, but retains a fresh haylike scent and has amazing appeal.

Or the 1983 Cabernet Cask Reserve Cabernet ($15), with its stylish fruit and rich finish (but still a little hard--the vintage characteristic).

Adopting an Orphan Wine

One of the best wines in the line is one you’ll have to adopt rather than buy because it’s an orphan wine. That phrase is one I use to refer to grape varieties made out of love by a wine maker, but which have no home because they are appreciated by so few people.

But one taste of 1984 Inglenook Charbono ($8.50) will be enough. It is one of the finest red wines yet produced by Inglenook, which remains one of the very few wineries in the state to produce a wine from this Italianate grape variety. The aroma of pipe tobacco and blackberries mingle in a most complex sort of wine. This is a wine to age for two decades. And for those with children born in 1984 who’d like to stash away some of this superb wine, it’s available in 3-liter bottles.

Sinskey is a shorter story, clearly, because the winery isn’t even built yet. But Dr. Robert Sinskey, a world-renowned Santa Monica-based ophthalmologist, has dreams of greatness and to achieve it he has hired Joe Cafaro as wine maker and John Heffelbower as national sales director. Cafaro was wine maker for six years at Chappellet and seven years at Robert Keenan before joining Acacia in a project that never really got off the ground for lack of funds.

Sinskey was a partner in Acacia and rather than let a talent like Cafaro get away, he bought land off the Silverado Trail in Yountville, south of here, and began building a dramatic winery with 5,000 square feet of caves dug into the hillside.

Then he bought two vineyards in the Carneros region, famed for its Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, and Cafaro began making wine for the project at a neighboring winery in 1986.

The first Chardonnay from Sinskey (1986, $16.50) is a far more complex, lean, tart little rascal that--typical of Cafaro’s style--is perfect with food and will become glorious with a year or two of bottle age. Heffelbower said the tartness at present makes the wine a bit hard to sell. I replied that the fault lies with the buyers, not the wine making.

The better of the first two Sinskey wines, a 1986 Pinot Noir ($12), is delicate and fragrant with hints of clove and cinnamon, and offers a marvelous aftertaste.

Sinskey developed an intra-ocular lens used by thousands of ophthalmologists, and his label has embedded subtly in the background the image of that lens. The image of his winery is getting off the ground with two delightful wines.

Wine of the Week: 1987 Markham Muscat de Frontignan ($8)--Amazingly fresh, spicy wine with sweetness to mask any hint of bitterness. Muscat is an overlooked wine, but I have tasted a lot of marvelous Muscats in the last few weeks from the 1987 harvest (Robert Pecota, St. Francis, Kendall-Jackson to name but three others), and this one competes with them all and might be better than any of them.