Mister Grape

Napa Valley’s so-called cult wines have been getting a lot of attention recently. So have the high-profile consultants who make them.

What’s seldom mentioned is that behind each label is a vineyard specialist whose job is deploying grape vines to translate soil, water and sunshine into rudimentary wine, which can then be elevated and stylized by the winemakers (many of them in a single large custom-crush facility near Rutherford).

More often than not, that grower is David Abreu, the vineyard designer and manager behind such high-profile wines as Spottswoode, Viader, Harlan, Araujo, Colgin and Pahlmeyer, to name just a few.

Given that it takes about four or five years from laying out a vineyard to getting the first crop (and another two years, at least, before the first wine is released), it might be said that Abreu is living in the past. On the strength of his track record, it’s safe to assume that some of the projects he’s working on now will produce notable wines at some point, but now they’re just muddy fields surrounded by huge piles of rocks.

Abreu grew up in Napa Valley and worked for several large wineries (Inglenook and Beringer among them) before striking out on his own in 1980. Honing his apparently instinctive grasp of viticulture with regular field trips to Bordeaux and Burgundy, he learned how to turn raw Napa Valley acreage into an instrument for producing the kind of bold, concentrated flavors, fine structure and supple tannins that say “Napa Valley” on the palate.

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For two decades he has remained mostly in the background; although most of his clients trade as much in glamour as in grapes, Abreu is as down-to-earth as the vines he grows.

Most people see the Napa Valley as a single entity. But Abreu works only in the sector he knows, roughly between Oakville and St. Helena. The rest of the valley is terra incognita to him. Recently he started a project in Stags Leap District but backed out because he didn’t feel comfortable so far from his own turf.

“They’re great people,” he told me, “and I liked the project, but it bothered me going down there. You’re sitting in a vehicle and driving, driving, and that just didn’t feel good.”

He may not like a lot of driving, but Abreu is in the driver’s seat when it comes to taking on new projects. With potential clients standing in line to throw money at him, he accepts only projects that he thinks will result in superb wine.

“Some people think they can move anywhere in this valley and plant grapes and build a winery and have a world-class wine,” he said. “We’ve seen a lot of them come and go. And a lot of them stay anyway, because they’ve got enough funny money to go ahead and plant or to buy some hillside fruit to blend in and make their wine better.”

If Abreu isn’t convinced the project has potential, he won’t take it on. “I’ll tell them without blinking an eye that they probably can’t make a great Cabernet Sauvignon from this property,” he said.

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One of the things that characterizes Abreu’s style of project development is that he works closely with a winemaker from the very beginning. “When the project is put together,” he said, “a winemaker is hired parallel to me, right from the start, to make decisions on things like grape varieties and sizing vine blocks to match individual fermentation tanks. I also spend a lot of time sitting with the owners, tasting wines, building an identity.”

Winemakers he’s worked with include Helen Turley, Heidi Peterson Barrett, Marc Aubert, Ric Forman and Mia Klein. The winemaker he began with, and the one he’s worked with most closely, is Tony Soter (who has just retired from the consulting business to focus on his own brand, Etude, and a new Pinot Noir vineyard in Oregon).

The Abreu empire began with the Madrona Vineyard, 25 acres of red Bordeaux grapes in the first steep rise of the Mayacamas foothills west of St. Helena. It was Abreu’s first vineyard; he planted most of it in 1980 after leaving his last corporate vineyard job, adding a contiguous block in 1985. Abreu is producing his own wines from this vineyard as well as from his own Rico-Mateo Vineyard, named after his young sons.

Among his newest projects are several vineyards on Pritchard Hill, a mountain on the east side of the valley. Late in the day, with the west side of the valley already in shadow and a chill in the air whispering that it was still frost season, we drove up to take a look.

The new Colgin Vineyard will be 25 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot spaced at 3 by 6 feet (about as close as Abreu cares to go) on the edge of a deep ravine. The landscape tells a dry story, all scrawny little water-starved oaks and meager soil. The first wines (to be made by Mark Aubert) will be vintage 2003 or ‘04, and they promise to show an intensity commensurate with the landscape.

Abreu was smiling as he looked around at a scene others might describe as chaotic, with huge Caterpillar tractors parked by piles of the yellow boulders they had pulled up out of the ground. Sticking up in the middle of a small undisturbed patch was one of the Adcon radio telemetry weather stations that began gathering climate data long before the first tractor showed up. What really seemed to give Abreu satisfaction was an example of his own hydraulic engineering: a system of rock-lined gutters the size of canals, designed to divert and drain surface water before it can erode the hillside.

That kind of prepping, he said, is essential to success in the challenging world of hillside winegrowing. “One of the keys is uniformity in how the vines grow, and a little thing like drainage can make all the difference in uniformity.”

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At the Madrona Vineyard, I had noticed something like pride, or perhaps a keen satisfaction, as Abreu pointed out features of the winegrowing terrain he had engineered. On the new Colgin site I saw something else--a kind of bright anticipation that was almost salacious.

Clearly Abreu was looking at the mess of mud and rocks and heavy equipment on that mountainside and tasting a fabulous Cabernet Sauvignon in his mind.

On the way down the mountain, Abreu said he had just agreed to develop a new vineyard on the Silverado Trail in the Rutherford American Viticultural Area. “We’re looking for a winemaker,” he said. “We’re looking for a new Tony Soter.”