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| Maya (L) and Naoko(R) Dalla Valle |
If you're not familiar with Dalla Valle, it may be because you have never seen the brand in your local supermarket, or because they do not have an open tasting room in Napa Valley.
On the rare occasions that I've been invited (or weaseled myself in) to try coveted wines like Chateau Margaux, L'Ermita, Krug, or Lopez de Heredia, it's usually on their turf, and under highly controlled circumstances. It can be a lonely experience when you're just left alone in a grand reception room, or even when you're in a spiderweb-laced cellar with a few other tasters to try a few wines.
It can be alienating, and not an easy experience to share, because it's too precious. It makes me feel spoiled, and I start to get suspicious about motives, expectations, and who's watching - maybe because I don't feel worthy, I suppose.
And maybe that's why Steph Curry takes Drake to In-n-Out Burger after Warriors games.There's always that part of a grounded person that wants to suppress the pretentiousness and privilege.
But my lunch meeting with Naoko and Maya Dalla Valle was lovely. I found them to be very down-to-earth and personable. It was nice to meet on neutral turf and hear more about their story. I felt no desire to drive through In-n-Out after our lunch to cleanse or devile myself with a greasy burger.
Naoko and Maya don't do a ton of interviews. Why? Mostly because they don't have to, and that's a privilege that I can certainly appreciate. Naoko, in particular, seems to appreciate not being a center of attention. I get the firm impression that she'd rather be caring with the vines with her vineyard consultants and directing a complicated, small business than hosting showy events every other evening. If I were in her shoes, I think I'd feel the same way. That leaves her more time to attend to some of her philanthropic interests, like advocating for healthcare, children's causes and farmworkers in Napa Valley. She's on the board of directors of OLE Health, a not-for-profit health center in Napa Valley.
But since Dalla Valle has a new public relations firm that wants to get them out of the house a little more often, I was blessed with an appointment. And a lovely one it was. We met up at Wood Tavern on College Avenue in Oakland and had a great conversation and some very remarkable wines over duck confit and other delights. It was a genuine pleasure meeting them.
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| Maya, Tim T. and Naoko |
Dalla Valle is a small, Family-owned Estate. Dalla Valle is owned by Naoko and Maya Dalla Valle. Naoko is the widow of the late Gustav Dalla Valle, and Italian Steve Zissou sort of figure, who founded the scuba diving equipment business Scubapro, and was an anthropological diver. Gustav died in 1995, and Naoko has held the reins of the estate ever since, overseeing a major re-planting in the mid-90's right after her husband's death. This estate-only wine company only makes about 3,000 cases a year.
Initial Italian Influence and Tony Soter. It think it sometimes helps to understand what the impetus for company was, and in this case, there was Gustav's Italian inclination to try to do something Italian inspired. So they planted Sangiovese. Ten percent of the initial planting was Sangiovese.
Sangiovese performs extremely well on the mid-Napa Valley bench, but the profitability doesn't pencil out so well these days. Cabernet Sauvignon brings a much higher price per ton. Maya Dalle Valle told me that their early consultant, and noted Californa winemaking consultant Tony Soter, was the first to frankly tell her mom that she needed to re-think that plan and plant more Bordeaux varieties. From that point forward, Cabernet Franc figured even more prominently in the blends of Dalla Valle wines, which are largely based on Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc.
"He (Tony Soter) was a philosophy major, and he really opened my eyes to winegrowing," Naoko said. "He was never trying to put his own stamp on the wines."
Dalla Valle and the Whole Cult Cab Category:
Dalla Valle is often lumped into the "Cult Cabernet" class that emerged in the mid-1990s and became even more coveted as those with virtually unlimited expendable income in California's tech boom sought out the best that Napa had to offer in the late 1990's. These were the wines that achieved superior critical scores, and were also so limited that everyone just had to have them.
Part of what that means is that for many, Dalla Valle is out of reach. Dalla Valle does not have a tasting room that you can just stop by. And if you don't rate, you will not be able to call for an appointment to stop by and hang out at Dalla Valle. The waiting list for their wines is significant, and those wines are hardly inexpensive. Their cheapest Collina wine is $100 on release, Dalla Valle's Cabernet Sauvignon is $200, and Dalla Valle Maya goes for $400 out of the gate. Rarity certainly factors into the price. They only make about 3,000 cases of wine a year, which is not a lot for any winery, especially for a brand as famous and venerable as Dalla Valle. It's a really small operation, and I think that's important to remember.
Along with Dalla Valle, Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Araujo, Bryant and Colgin are usually included in that "cult" Cabernet club. Prices of their wines can sometimes increase hysterically, and plenty of other ambitious souls are always ready to jump into the game.
Schrader, Scarecrow, Brand, Abreu, Bevan Cellars and others have jumped into the fray of mad-limited, high-scoring hipster brands, many of which make extraordinary wines. Just don't think that they are all equal.
For example, I have not been blown away by Screaming Eagle and Colgin. I think they are technically very well-made wines, and I can absolutely understand why many people love them, but they just aren't my style. There are some gonzo wines that I find to be excessive, and lacking the finesse and the subtlety that I believe goes hand-in-hand with greatness, and that's frankly true of a lot of so-called "Reserve" Napa Valley wines that are often way bigger and more aggressive than they should be.
Most of these so-called "cult" wineries have extraordinary talent both in the winery and in the vineyards, but they do diverge in style to some degree. Some swing for the fences in terms of intensity and volume. Some are more subtle. I would put Dalla Valle in the latter camp. One arrow in Dalla Valle's quiver is the estimable Michel Rolland, hero to some, villain to others. Back to that topic in a moment...
What Makes a Truly Special Wine
The best, most special wines have a 'sense of place,' meaning they don't pretend to be anything other than what they are and where they came from, and they're very clear about that. These things are not the easiest to talk about, because they involve the perpetually controversial topics of terroir and minerality and all of the things that amateurs struggle with in this industry, but I'll briefly say this... Dalla Valle wines come from the eastern side of the central Napa Valley zone known as the Oakville District. Believe it or not, I wrote the text for the website for the Oakville District of Napa Valley a number of years ago. It's really nerdy, but if you care about this sort of thing, it's arguably relevant.
Napa Valley is a pretty special place for growing wine, particularly once you get up off of the valley floor and onto the hillsides. The climate is near perfect and forever forgiving. The soils are a bit challenging, at least more so than those of the valley floor.
The eastern slopes of the Oakville District of Napa Valley, where Dalla Valle's estate is located, are dominated by the volcanic basalt bluffs of the Vaca Mountain range, but other gravelly rocks tumble down into the bench area where Dalla Valle is located. Dalla Valle's wines are often described as having a 'cinder' or 'campfire' note. I would attribute that in part to the volcanic part of the soil profile, which gives a soft, dark note to the wines. There is also a pronounced gravelly, brighter rocky note to the wines that might be more associated with the the western side of the valley, but I think you can also find it on the Eastern side of the valley, to some degree, from rocks tumbled down the hills over the years.
The geology of Napa Valley is insanely complex, and that's one of the reasons that you can have an exceptionally complicated wine produced on a relatively small parcel of land. That's part of what makes Napa Valley special - especially on the hillside and mountain sites on either side of the valley.
I just find Dalla Valle's wines to be very articulate, not over-ripe, and not overly mucked up with obnoxious new oak. They really do have a distinct personality and a sense of place, and they are very well made and blended.
OK, Let's Talk About Michel Rolland
Michel Roland, a consultant factor in many top wines, is incredibly gifted at blending wines. I have traveled the world and visited many wineries he has consulted for. The guy is a genius. He's the Rick Rubin of blending.The art of blending involves taking a bunch of tanks or oak barrels of wine and putting them all together to make a symphonic wine. Rolland does offer some winemaking and maturation tips as a matter of course, but that's not his bread and butter these days.
"People forget that he's really not so much a winemaker as a consultant, but a blender," says Naoko Dalla Valle. "He usually comes in and creates a few blends, but he's usually right the first time."
Some people feel that Rolland's influence has been too widespread, leading to a homogenization of great wines across the international wine scene. I haven't met the guy personally, but I've visited a lot of wineries that he coaches and consults for all around the world, from Bordeaux to Argentina to California. In my experience, the wines tend to be really good. Personally, I think he's raised the bar substantially, especially when it comes to blending the final wine composed from a bunch of different barrels from different sites on a given estate.
The wines he works on always have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have drama and personality. They tend to be seamless and precise. Michel Rolland certainly has all kinds of haters, all of whom can go to hell in my humble opinion. The man deserves great respect and has very much shaped the aesthetic of what modern wine should be, and that's why so many of his wines enjoy wide acclaim. Any aspiring wine consultants should be taking notes from Michel Rolland, not talking trash about him. Is there a Michel Rolland formula? Yeah, it's making great tasting wine. And he's probably a lot better at it than you are.
Phil Spector was a brilliant music producer. Phil Spector is also a lunatic murderer. Michel Rolland is a brilliant wine constructor, but he is not a villain. He's just really good at making great wine, and a lot of the criticism that has been leveled at him over the past fifteen years is ludicrous.
Someday someone will gracefully articulate an alternative aesthetic that has an equal, popular appeal to that of Michel Rolland's sense of balance in expensive red wine. At least with regard to high end Bordeaux-style wines, I don't think that there is a more coherent aesthetic at this point. If Michel Rolland is blending your wine and training your winemakers, you have an advantage, albeit an expensive one.
The Repetitive Side of Napa Valley
The overlap of talent at top Napa Valley wineries can be yawn-inducing in its repetitiveness. A short list of winemakers and consultants dominate the top 50 list of the most expensive wines from Napa Valley. That said, they do not all have the exact same aesthetic sensibilities, and perhaps you can chalk the difference up to terroir, coupled with the aesthetics of the owners if they are so bold as to assert their preferences.
If you are in the rare position of having the opportunity to taste a few of these from time to time, you can begin to form an opinion as to those that you think rise above the others.
One of the so-called cult wineries that I can endorse is Dalla Valle.
The wines are extraordinarily balanced and complex. They aren't gonzo, ultra-ripe, sappy wines like some other Napa Cult Cabs. They speak clearly of the east side of the mid-Napa, Oakville bench that they come from, they are refined, tasteful and incredibly layered and well-blended, and all from a compact, 20-acre estate.
The chief winemaker at Dalla Valle today is Andy Erickson, also a consultant to Spottswoode, another one of my absolute favorite Napa wineries. Michel Rolland flies in to make the final blend for the three reds. Erickson is reportedly comfortable with the fact that at some point, Maya will take over chief winemaker duties at Dalla Valle, and she seems a worthy candidate.The Next Generation
It is anticipated that Maya herself will ultimately be the chief winemaker at Dalla Valle, taking over the family business from the famous consultants that have guided Dalla Valle's winemaking to date.
Maya Dalle Valle studied oenology, among other things, at Cornell. "I didn't want to go the easy way," she says. She did drift back home to her family's winery, and I'm not suggesting that's an easy pursuit, either. At Dalla Valle, she would be taking up a very big torch, and it wasn't necessarily going to be a simple legacy situation.
Her mother, Naoko was willing to give her a shot, but she wanted to make sure she was qualified, and we all know that sometimes our parents can be our harshest critics. "You know I won't hire you if you don't have the right degree," her mom reminded her.
Maya did stints as a production assistant with Rolland in Argentina as well as at Ornellaia, Petrus, Chateau Latour, and Ch. Canon La Gaffeliere. To put it briefly, she has tasted a lot of great wine and knows how to make it. As the heir apparent, she has some real advantages.
To me, the best winemakers are the ones that have the best, most refined taste in wine. They know what great wine tastes like, so they have a target that they're trying to hit. The best of them think like critics, not in that they try to forecast what a particular critic will like, but in that they try to make wines with the hallmarks that a good critic looks for: precision and flair.
You might be surprised how few people have really spent their lives tasting great wines before they set out to be winemakers. Maya Dalla Valle is still young, but she already knows what great wine tastes like, and that is distinct head start, because if you want to be a good marksman, it's important to understand the target that you're trying to hit. A lot of great wines have passed the lips of Maya Dalla Valle, and with that comes winemaking wisdom.
One of the other most important things that great winemakers understand is that to make a wine that is compelling and thrilling, you have to first start with a really fine site that has first class potential. Next, you employ best practices and more in the vineyard. Finally, after harvest, you have to channel the true nature of the vineyard straight into the bottle without interfering with it too much, just gently polishing and managing the wine along the way. It think that has been the course for Dalla Valle for several decades.
The Wines Are Expensive. No joke. These Dalla Valle wines are very expensive, and made from one of the legit best Cabernet and Cab Franc Regions in the world. Production of Maya is nearing 1,000 cases at $400 release price per botle. The Napa Valley Cabernet is $200 per bottle release price, also about 1,000 cases per year. "Collina" is about $85 per bottle and though it is made from younger plantings aged about 7-8 years, they are already what would normally be considered fully mature.
Dalla Valle 2015 "Collina" Red Wine Napa Valley ($85) Super impressive, even at this price. I have no doubt the family could sell it for more, but Naoko says that she really wants to leave the door open for new and younger (but well-heeled) customers. Collina is made from younger vines than the other wines, but the vines are mostly close to ten years old and fully mature. It's vibrant, fresh, focused and complex. Even at this price, I have to concede that it's arguably a great value. There are layers of nuance and sophistication that you just don't see in a lot of bombastic Napa Cabs that sell for well over $100. (94 Points)
Dalla Valle 2014 Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley ($200) One of the truly original "Cult" Cabernets, with only about 1,000 cases produced in a given vintage. Why is it so coveted? Well, not because it's one of those overblown, overripe, high alcohol trainwreck wines. It's way more subtle than that. This Dalla Valle Cabernet is a remarkably complex blend of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from a relatively small 20-acre site. The nose is almost salty smelling, with crushed rock, dried flower, dried herb, graphite, gunpowder, smoke and black and red fruit aromas. It's beautifully balanced and seamless in the mouth. The oak is perfectly integrated. Everything is in it's place, and it isn't easy to separate out a lot of independent flavors, which is really the hallmark of an artfully blended wine. There's enough grippy, tarry tannin and sufficient acid to carry it for twenty years or more, and a lingering, gravelly minerality on the finish. Truly special. (97 Points)
Dalla Valle 2014 Maya Propietary Blend Napa Valley ($400) Dalla Valle can rightly claim to be at the forefront of the "proprietary blend" not-Cabernet labeled Napa Bordeaux blend movement with this Cabernet Franc dependent blend. It's a deep, intense red with cassis, blackberry, tar, gravelly mineral notes and length to spare. It has a lot of the terroir in common with the Cabernet Sauvignon from Dalla Valle, but it is blockier, sturdier, and should be longer lived. At this age, I don't know that I could justify double the price of the Cabernet Sauvignon, but maybe, over time, this is a wine that outlives it by fifteen years, or maybe it's less elegant. Time will tell. (97 Points)
-Tim Teichgraeber
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