The cowboys ride into Napa

HIGH above the northeast Napa Valley, one of California’s original wine estates is being brought back to life by cowboys. Pat and Anne Stotesbury left Montana cattle ranching behind to grow Cabernet Sauvignon vines on the rugged flanks of Howell Mountain and make wine in a massive stone winery.

The 1886 building dominates the mountain ridge like a ruined medieval castle. It was full of rattlesnakes and bats when the Stotesburys tore off the roof to begin renovation; now it is swarming with workers. Meanwhile, the Stotesburys expanded the original barrel-aging cave underneath, and their first few vintages of Ladera Vineyards Cabernet rest there now.

“ ‘Ladera’ means hillside in Spanish. We chose that name because we think the best wines come from mountain vineyards,” explains Pat Stotesbury, a wiry man who inhabits a huge white cowboy hat and walks like someone who’d rather be riding.

He and his wife, Anne, went to Napa Valley one summer when a film company leased their log cabin in Montana. “That was the trip that changed our lives,” she says. They now own two mountain vineyards, the Howell Mountain property (purchased in 2000) and another on Mt. Veeder (1998), both 75 acres and both originally planted in 1877.

Howell Mountain is a world above the world, as remote from the Napa Valley as the Sierra Nevada or the Pacific Ocean. And yet it is an important part of the valley -- not just an elevated subregion within the Napa Valley appellation but a long-term source of some of the valley’s best grapes and wines, and thus a pillar of its reputation.

It’s better described as a forested plateau than a mountain. Unlike the more immediately accessible mountains on the valley’s west side, Howell Mountain does not appear to be a geological extension of the valley but rather a great mass, like Mt. St. Helena, crouched above and beyond it.

Before Prohibition, Howell Mountain was the second-best-known wine district in the valley, after Rutherford. But the wineries and vineyards on the mountain were largely forgotten until 1983, when Howell Mountain became the first subordinate appellation within the Napa Valley American Viticultural Area.

Cool days, warm nights

Howell Mountain’s vineyards are between 1,400 feet and 2,500 feet above sea level -- putting them among the highest in the world. These vines see significantly more sunshine every day than vineyards lower down.

But longer days don’t necessarily mean more heat. At that altitude, the days are cooler than on the valley floor, and because the vineyards are above the valley’s inversion layer (warmer air sitting on top of cooler air), the nights tend to be warmer. The climate brings out striking qualities in the grapes. There’s a balance of intense, almost rough, concentration and piercing clarity in Howell Mountain reds that reflects the ethereal brightness of mountain sunshine.

That’s augmented by the mountain’s soils. Unlike the valley floor and the western slopes, where sedimentary and alluvial soils dominate and soil profiles can vary widely within small areas, Howell Mountain has volcanic soils in just a few variations. These lean, well-drained soils give wines with exceptional definition and structure.

The first Ladera Vineyards Cabernets are a good example of what the mountain can do. Like other notable Howell Mountain Cabs, from producers such as Dunn, Beringer and Duckhorn, they are striking for their structured richness and fruit-weighted balance, and their voluminous breadth and depth.

Winemaker Karen Culler is a veteran of wineries such as Vichon and knows valley floor Cabernet well. Howell Mountain Cabernet is a different animal entirely, she says: “The big things up here are the well-drained, gravelly red soil and the cooler days. In the morning you might think it will get up to a hundred degrees, but the afternoon doesn’t get much hotter. And the nights are warmer, so the temperature differential is smaller. That gives you big, full-bodied wines that are soft too.”

The inaugural Ladera Howell Mountain Cab ’01 is just that. I tasted barrel samples from two different pickings. They showed incredible color, high-toned fragrance and intense flavors, with thick, chewy tannin and bright acidity. But those Howell Mountain traits were expressed in two subtly different ways, showing the effect harvest timing can have on style in a well-situated vineyard. The early-picked wine had a cut-crystal definition and vertical structure, while the later pick was broader and richer.

A storied past

There’s a lot of history here. The winery was built in 1886 as the Nouveau Medoc Wine Cellars by two Bordeaux businessmen, Jean Adolphe Brun and W.J. Chaix. In the happy days before Prohibition it pumped a tannic red river of “Napa Valley Claret” (primarily Zinfandel) through the Rutherford train station to the firm’s cellars under San Francisco’s Financial District.

At one time the winery was surrounded by acres of red and white grapes planted in the late 1870s. After Prohibition, however, the vineyards were reclaimed by nature and the hulking winery became the haunt of twilight creatures.

The property languished until it was rescued in 1980 by yet another pair of Bordelais, Francis and Francoise Dewavrin-Woltner, former owners of the famous Chateau La Mission Haut-Brion in Bordeaux. Ironically, after living with Cabernet Sauvignon all their lives the Woltners devoted their New World estate exclusively to Chardonnay.

Unfortunately, the rootstock they chose was phylloxera-susceptible AXR-1, and the vicious root-sucking aphid did the vineyard in. When the Stotesburys bought the property in 2000, they immediately replanted with Cabernet, Merlot and other red Bordeaux grapes on resistant rootstocks.

And they took the opportunity to define the property in 12 main vine blocks, each with six sub-blocks. Each unit has its own grape varieties, clones and rootstocks.

As the vines mature, tasting separate barrel lots of young wine from different vine blocks will be like drawing a sensory map of the estate’s terroir.