One thing led to another, and he was offered the job.Īmong the first things he had to do, he said, was shed the sommelier’s air of omniscience. Lawrence was considered buying a Napa property, he sought Mr.

Lawrence at the Little Nell, where he had been a regular guest, and when Mr. McCoy, the leap from sommelier to wine executive has required some fast learning. “It’s a luxury to be able to do that without financial pressure.”įor Mr.

“If we were struggling, it would be a problem,” he said. Sherwood determined the wine would be better with more aging before it was released, but that meant the Heitz chardonnay would be out of the market for a year. In the winery, he said, the changes have been small tweaks, aimed at improving the texture of the wine and working in a less formulaic way, depending on the needs of a particular wine.įor example, the Heitz chardonnay, which we did not taste, had historically been bottled young. McCoy said, have come in the vineyard in an effort to find the properly balanced yield, and fruit that needs as little manipulation as possible beyond the addition of tartaric acid. Many of the modifications made by the new ownership, Mr. Sherwood, the winemaker, said that while the overall process remained the same, there have been changes since she arrived in 2012, “always to improve the wine.” Many 2016 Napa cabernets are already in the market, and some 2017s as well. In all, the Napa is aged for four years before it’s released - 2014 is the most recent vintage available - and the single-vineyards for five years. The wines rest in the tanks for about a year before they are moved to small barrels of French oak, where the Napa Valley blend ages for two years and the single-vineyards for three. When it is almost finished with the fermentation, it is pressed off into large upright tanks made of American oak and redwood, manufactured in the early 1960s and purchased by Heitz in the ’80s. The cabernet is fermented in steel tanks. Heitz’s winemaking methods today are largely the same, and the wines are just as lively. They are perhaps a tad rustic, and the beloved acidity may one day be the last thing remaining, like the Cheshire cat’s grin. These would not be mistaken for contemporary wines. McCoy said has farmed organically since the 1980s, is converting 425 acres to biodynamic viticulture. The biggest immediate change is that Heitz, which Mr. McCoy put it, “understanding the significance of what we have and preserving it.”īrittany Sherwood, who joined Heitz in 2012 straight out of the viticulture and oenology program at University of California, Davis, and who learned under David Heitz, has stayed on as winemaker. Lawrence has simply entrusted the Heitz team to do whatever it needs to do to make the best possible wines squarely in the Heitz tradition, or, as Mr. Success might have been judged by measuring Heitz against other Napa baubles belonging to the tycoon cohort.

Lawrence, in the way of other new, wealthy owners of Napa Valley vineyards, to turn Heitz into a vanity project. His daughter Westin Lawrence came aboard as marketing and public relations liaison. Lawrence appointed Carlton McCoy Jr., 35, a young but celebrated American sommelier, as president and chief executive, and gave him the task of both charting a course back to prominence for Heitz and envisioning its path over the next 15 years. Two of his children, David Heitz and Kathleen Heitz Myers, ran the business until last year, when they sold the business to Gaylon Lawrence Jr., an agricultural magnate from Arkansas. Producers like Heitz, who despite occasional troubles have stood the test of time (and elsewhere might have been elevated to pantheon status), were eclipsed by wines that seemed to fit a more modern aesthetic. These tiny operations, which came to prominence in the 1990s, have parlayed scarcity and exorbitant prices to become Napa’s most coveted bottles. Helena, Calif., Heitz Cellar’s cabernet sauvignons, particularly its Martha’s Vineyard bottles, were among the most prized wines produced in Napa Valley.ĭespite this early acclaim, Heitz today is rarely mentioned among the Napa Valley elite, having long been overshadowed by the rise of Napa’s cult cabernet producers. Half a century ago, since shortly after Joe and Alice Heitz bought a small property in 1961 in St.

But today? Heitz is practically singular. Many Napa cabernets might have been made with similar methods back in the 1970s. The Heitz method of making cabernet sauvignon, with a premium on high acidity and low pH, runs counter to many cherished current beliefs about how great wine ought to be produced. But to the contemporary way of thinking about wine, or at least my way of thinking, they were hard to figure.

Heitz cellar