This 110-Acre Napa Valley Estate Comes With a Boutique Winery and Wine Cave
With land in Napa Valley among the priciest anywhere in the United States, vineyards planted more than 40 years ago are a truly limited luxury asset. As costs of both real estate and farming continue to rise, many parcels are vanishing without notice, making wine made from old vines increasingly scarce, especially in Napa. While it would seem like a storied region with more than 150 years of winemaking history that rose to international prominence 50 years ago would be teeming with older grapevines, a phylloxera outbreak there in the 1980s and ’90s that decimated upwards of 50,000 acres of vines—including significant amounts of Cabernet Sauvignon—led to a valley-wide replanting effort that has many plots falling shy of the 35-year mark.
While there isn’t an agreed-upon definition or age limit for vines to be considered old, it is known that complexity and concentration increase in direct proportion to vine age. These qualities create the type of wines that collectors actively seek, which offer greater equilibrium, structure, and age-worthiness. “I see old-vine character more as a mellowing of the tannins and a balance with the fruit,” says La Jota winemaker Chris Carpenter, whose Cabernet Franc is made mostly with grapes from the Winery Block in the La Jota Vineyard on Howell Mountain, which was planted in 1976. “The vines are 50 years old, which is a long time for grapevines,” he says. “As they have aged, the volume of fruit has decreased, and the quality has ratcheted up.”…