A Note from Elton
There’s more than a hint of spring in the air here in Northern California, so I’ll be full-on wearing shorts to the office (farm life has its privileges) today to taste through more of our 2024 lots of wine in 75-degree weather. It has been freezing cold and rainy in the valley for almost the entire month of February, so this sunshine is a nice respite despite the fact that the vines are happiest when the sap burrows down to the roots and they can go fully dormant. Looks like March is expected to bring a solid series of storms our way—and according to Miguel, Nick and the crew over at Silverado Farming Co. that’s good news for the vines. A strong, steady dose of rain now means a healthy crop later, so things are shaping up beautifully on our mountain vineyards for the 2025 vintage. I also learned that we need to conduct two “grazing passes” with our sheep herd because if we wait, the sprouted seeds in the grass irritate the lips of the sheep, and they will ignore the taller vegetation. I made a note. I’m just wondering when I’ll get an online offer for a sheep herd subscription service at this point.
More than anything this year, the 2022 wines we’re sending out to you and your fellow Cabernet Collective members are about vineyard—about why vineyard source matters more than anything. In my last dubiously important wine musing (sent under the guise of a New Year’s greeting), I lamented how our nine-thousand-year-old craft has been hijacked by the mediocrity of bulk production. A uniquely American phenomenon, if I’m being honest. That got me thinking about how easy it is to get swept up in the noise—whether it’s mass-produced wine or the digital avalanche of things we never asked for. Somewhere between that diatribe and today, I also found myself trapped in Meta’s steel-jawed algorithm, courtesy of an Instagram follower with questionable taste who sent me a reel that launched my feed down quite the dark path. A year later, I’ve barely escaped the endless firehose of bizarrely curated content. Fortunately, my algorithm has mostly recalibrated—back to handmade bicycles, luxury wine, attractive track athletes, and Norm MacDonald. You can tell a lot about a person just by tapping their Instagram search bar. It’s both terrifying and eerily accurate. I’d ditch social media in a heartbeat if it weren’t for the incredible wine connections we’ve built there. The Yin and Yang always travel as a pair. One thing I do know: the importance of vineyard-driven winemaking is more relevant than ever. Fortunately, our algorithm at The Craig remains unchanged: mountain farming, real wine, and the people who make it all happen.
Somewhere along the line in America’s embracing of wine, just after Lancer’s Rosé and White wine appeared in terra cotta bottles from Portugal to adorn tables adjacent to the tennis court, eighteenth hole, and the swimming pool in the mid 1970s in doses of millions of cases, large producers decided that Heublein Import Co. shouldn’t have all of the fun, not to mention the cash flow. Fast forward to where we are now with the predominance of wine that is offered and consumed in this country, whether in airports, hotels, supermarkets, retail shops, or restaurant chain concepts, originating from large lots of bulk gallons purchased from a broker and assembled to fit a “concept” packaging and product niche. Think Meomi, Mark West, Josh, and on and on. These wines simply suck, and they still command a close to $20 price tag for a glass. God only knows what the check would total if you ordered the deviled eggs on the side. I ordered a glass of Erath pinot (formally Knudsen Erath, an old favorite) at my hotel bar in Palm Beach last month, and it proved thin and totally devoid of character, so I asked to see the bottle. Of course the AVA is now Oregon instead of Willamette Valley, and Google informed me that it sold to the Chateau Ste Michelle Wine Estates behemoth in the mid 2000s. Aha. So, what’s the choice for the next generation of wine consumers? There’s no Ravenswood or Kenwood or Kunde or Seghesio or Arrowood or Chateau St Jean or Benziger left to start a journey into great wines at a reasonable price. Thank the heavens that the folks at Rodney Strong and Gundlach Bundschu are still at it in Sonoma. It’s all gone large with wine in the USA, so Gen Y and Gen Z are saying, I’ll have a cocktail and a hit of weed off of my disposable vape pen. My experience of simply trying to find a decent glass of wine outside of a “wine bar” finally galvanized me into producing some myself. But that’s a story for another day.
And that brings me back to Napa Valley—a place where wine pricing is dictated less by quality and more by real estate values and the debt load that comes with them. At Robert Craig Winery, we keep it simple: make the most vineyard-specific, age-worthy wines in the world first, and worry about the price later. I’m still waiting for my boat, statement necklace, and inevitable stint on celebrity rehab. These aren’t mass-produced gallons of wine. These are grapes, farmed organically at high elevations, on stony soils, from mature vines. They’re hand-harvested and brought into our Howell Mountain facility, where Jason and Yordanos nurture and elevate them with intention. We co-ferment certain lots we know will belong together, while others are blended at dryness to maximize integration over months in barrel. The farm work is handled by the best: Pete Richmond, Miguel Luna, and Nicholas Antignano at Silverado Farming Co. oversee our Howell Mountain sites, while the legendary Phil Coturri of Enterprise Vineyard Management manages our Mount Veeder property. These are serious wines made by serious people.
Over the past three years, their direction to increase our canopy size to lessen heat exposure in the vine rows as well as pruning later so that the vines’ grape ripening cycle is delayed beyond typical September heat spikes has meant that our vineyards and clusters have weathered the heat spikes in 2019, 2021, and 2022 with ease. Add in the natural advantage of our high-elevation sites where cooler average temperatures help preserve structure and nerve, and you have the foundation for producing wines of record. When you open bottles from your first shipment of our 2022 Cabernet Sauvignons (after allowing three weeks rest from shipping!) you will experience all of the hard work that went into the ingredient base for these wines in the three years previous to their vintage date. The 2022 Affinity Cabernet Sauvignon and the 2022 Spring Mountain District Cabernet Sauvignon are live wire, taut, dark, and soulful examples of what mountain and hillside Cabernet should display. These are not mass-produced gallons, these are wines raised from grapes by exacting farmers and winemakers who refuse to compromise.
If you are feeling adventurous, you should also elect to try some of our 2022 Howell Mountain Merlot from Block 4 on our Candlestick Ridge Vineyard. It is a huge, weighty, vibrant, and velvety experience of the Right Bank from Howell Mountain. And for those seafood-on-the-grill nights, the 2023 Gap’s Crown Chardonnay is a must. It’s our raciest to date (outside of the legendary 2011), with all the verve and precision that make Sonoma Coast Chardonnay so compelling. These wines aren’t part of your automatic shipment (unless you’re an A La Mode member), but they’re tiny-production gems—beautiful, rare, and worth seeking out.
To conclude the latest Tome of the Unnecessary, I want to say thank you for your continued advocacy of wines and people that exist outside of the corporate algorithm where wine is designed to be 1) unobjectionable 2) uninspired and 3) profitable above all else. Our vineyard sites, our farming, our winemaking and winery crew and my complete inability to capitulate to the lesser are what keeps the Craig alive and thriving in 2025. I hope you will join me in my quest to shop local, buy from high-quality family wineries in California and sharing the good stuff no matter what day of the week. Wishing you and your family and friends a terrific start to Spring and plenty of time smelling the roses as the songbirds emerge to remind us that there is beauty all around. Thank you for your membership, and enjoy these tremendous 2022s when they arrive.
Love and Peace,
Elton
