Napa Valley

The Lay of the Land

Napa Valley, arguably the New World’s preeminent fine wine region, is diminutive in proportion. Thirty miles long and only a few miles wide, Napa is roughly one-eighth the size of Bordeaux and produces less than 0.5% of the world’s wine. That equals about 4% of California’s total output but, due to the high value of the wines, 25% of the state’s annual wine revenue.

This scant production is scattered across many labels. Napa Valley Vintners (NVV) reported approximately 475 physical wineries in 2017, but the prevalence of custom crushing means that the actual number of brands is much higher, estimated at over 1,000. Only a handful, such as Beringer, Beaulieu Vineyard, and Martini, are considered large by international standards; the majority are quite small, producing less than 10,000 cases of wine each year. Two of the more famous brands, Harlan Estate and Screaming Eagle, make less than 2,000 and 1,000 cases, respectively. To once again stretch the Bordeaux comparison, the first growths of Latour and Margaux annually produce a respective average of 18,000 and 11,000 cases of grand vin.

Visitors are welcomed to Napa with a line from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Silverado Squatters (Photo credit: Adobe Stock)

Napa’s pricing has always been ambitious. Back in 1996, the first vintage of Harlan (1990) was released for $65 a bottle. That may not sound scandalous now, but at the time it raised eyebrows; the only other Napa wine that commanded such a price was Opus One. Prior to that, Joseph Heitz received backlash in the 1960s when he bumped the price of his Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon to $9, putting it on par with Bordeaux’s first growths. And even before Prohibition, Gustave Niebaum’s prices for his top Inglenook wines