What's Pressoir Drinking?
by Raj Vaidya
Tuesday April 21, 2021
I had the luck to visit with the team at Eisele Vineyard in Napa Valley last week, a very special site in the southern part of Calistoga. I’ve long been a fan, really getting to know the place during the previous ownership period when it was converted to biodynamic farming by the Araujo family. Prior to 1991, when the Araujos purchased the property from the Eisele family, the wines were made by a series of different producers, beginning in 1971 when Ridge Vineyards bottled it as a single vineyard designate for the first time, followed later in the 70’s by a series of vintages by Joseph Phelps Winery.
Today the vineyard is owned and managed by Artemis Domaines, Francois Pinault’s wine management company, which also owns and operates Château Grillet in the Northern Rhône, Domaines d’Eugenie and Clos de Tart in Burgundy, and the iconic Château Latour in Bordeaux. Needless to say, the current regime makes tremendous wines from this site, as they are known to do…
Eisele is unique in Napa for a number of reasons; it sits in a small nook, almost an amphitheater formation at the bottom of a canyon cutting into the hillsides of the Vaca Mountain range. A creek which divides the ‘Grand Vin’ section that has long been bottled as the vineyard designate from this site brings a variety of round, river stones down from the mountain, along with shale, volcanic basalt and gravel. Essentially, this amounts to ‘mountain terroir’ on the valley floor. In addition, the nook the property sits within opens up to the valley facing north and west, and is greatly influenced by the cooling breezes of the Pacific as they enter the valley north of Calistoga, allowing for the coolest nights in all of Napa, meaning greater acidity in the wines.
While the wines Eisele is producing today are spectacular, they are still (in their own words) at the beginning of their journey in expressing the terroir here. They are also clearly built to age, so I think it will be some years before the vintages they’ve produced start to show their true beauty. Luckily for me the winemaker, Hélène Mingot, and her husband, Estate Director Antoine Donnedieu, have been hard at work sourcing some older examples to continue to inform their palates and direction. During my visit, we sat for a meal and drank the first vintage bottled under the Phelps label…
Tremendous freshness was immediately apparent and quite impressive. Layers upon layers of classic Cabernet notes, eucalyptus, green peppercorn, pencil shavings and dried cassis dominated the nose and carried through on the palate, with more fresh fruit notes and even some plum, something I usually associate more with younger wines. The finish was intense and long. Not an overly powerful wine, rather subtle actually, but not one I’ll forget soon. I jump at all chances to drink Napa wines from the 70’s in general, but now I know that these well stored Eisele wines are truly spectacular and I’ll be keeping an eye out for them always…
