Perhaps the best California wine that I’ve tasted this decade was some cabernet sauvignon that was to go into Pahlmeyer’s 2005 Proprietary Blend. It was about as small-lot as wine gets, part of a 5-gallon barrel prepared solely for the 2007 Premiere Napa Auction. A one-time only deal, alas, as the rest of this cab would disappear into the blend.

I’ve always wondered where that juice came from — wineries are rarely forthcoming about such details — and Tuesday, I found out first-hand: the Stagecoach Vineyard in the mountains east of Napa.

I was touring this 500-acre vineyard with one of its owners, Dr. Jan Krupp. Caymus, Paul Hobbs, Cardinale and many other esteemed winereries buy grapes from this rugged land.

How rugged? In clearing out the hills and dales to put in the vineyards since 1991, Krupp’s crew has dug up 500,000 tons of rocks. That’s, uh, 1 billion pounds. The remaining rocks make the vineyards “mildly stressed, which we like,” Krupp said.

Another obstacle in this ruggedly remote region (1,300 to 1,800 feet) was finding water. Krupp spent $10,000 having a biologist locate spots to drill for a well. Didn’t work. But when he hired a “water witch,” she found water immediately — for $300.

A few years back Krupp and his brother Bart decided to start making their own wine. Under the Veraison label., there’s a great examplar of mountain fruit in the cabernet sauvignon. Smooth, juicy, delicious stuff.

Unfortunately, two wonderful Rhone-ish wines are available only by mail from Krupp’s Black Bart label.  The syrah is deep, dark and smoky. The white blend (Black Bart’s Bride, but of course) is wonderfully complex and superb, every bit the equal of a top-flight Chateauneuf-du-Pape.

These wines have seriously cool labels, stylish silhouettes depicting 19th-century figures. The inspiration: The real “Black Bart” robbed a stagecoach a few miles from the vineyard.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 18th, 2009 at 5:44 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.