Napa Valley's Colgin Cellars Flees the Cult and Becomes a Classic

(WSJ) - THE VIEW FROM Colgin IX Estate, high atop a hill, encompassing Lake Hennessey and Napa Valley, bounded by the Mayacamas Mountains to the west, is one of the more awe-inspiring vistas in the region. As I looked out across the valley this past summer while tasting recent Colgin vintages with the vineyard's proprietor, Ann Colgin, I couldn't help thinking about my first experience sampling the very first vintage of Colgin Cabernet, in 1995, in a cramped and frigid cubicle in the Napa Wine Company, a winemaking cooperative on the Valley floor in Oakville, Calif.

It was my first trip to Napa, as well as my first wine-writing assignment, and I was nervous as hell. I'd never tasted wine at 10 in the morning—in fact I'd never tasted at all in the professional sense, and Helen Turley, Colgin's first, soon-to-be-famous winemaker, had a reputation for not suffering fools gladly. She was tall and Valkyrie-like, and she looked down at me as if I were a cowardly foot soldier who didn't deserve to be escorted to Valhalla. After pouring her own very impressive Marcassin Chardonnays, she opened a 1992 Colgin Herb Lamb Vineyard, which pretty much would have knocked my socks off had I been wearing any. It was like a young Left Bank Bordeaux, except more seductive. At the time I thought, "sexy librarian," because, while the wine was very rich and voluptuous, it also had an earthy, savory component that made it seem, well, kind of smart. It was entirely Cabernet, but the tannins were silky in a way that was more like Merlot, more like a Pomerol than a Pauillac. I knew I'd experienced something special, but I didn't realize at the time I was getting a glimpse of the birth of a tectonic shift in the world of wine—the Napa equivalent of the recording of "Nevermind" a few years earlier.

The early '90s saw the birth of the "cult" Cabernets—a group of small-production, high-octane, high-gloss reds that included Araujo, Bryant Family, Colgin, Dalla Valle, Harlan and Screaming Eagle. When these wines emerged, Bordeaux was suffering a string of bad vintages, and the large Napa wineries seemed to be getting complacent. Small as their production was, these new wines had a huge impact on the way Cabernet was made around the world.