RSS
Home
Napa Valley Profiles: St. Supery Vineyards and Winery
Print
Email
RSS
Subscribe
September harvest at the Dollarhide Ranch vineyard
Robert Skalli, whose French family has been making wine for three generations, grew up with the knowledge that wine cannot be better than the grapes it is made from. When he visited the Napa Valley for the first time in 1971, he recognized that the unique topography, soil, and climate of the Valley could produce truly fine grapes that would make truly fine wine. For ten years he searched for, and, in 1982 found, the property he was looking for, the 1500-acre Dollarhide horse ranch in the Northeast corner of the Valley with seven lakes and seven types of soil. He began planting it with vines he knew from France, Cabernet Sauvignon and Sauvignon Blanc, choosing clones he thought would be suited well to the variety of land on the ranch, which ranged in both altitude and soil. His vision was to produce wines only from estate-grown grapes.
He built a winery in Rutherford, and bought additional land there.(Left: Rutherford entry to St. Supery marked by Benbow Bullock steel sculpture.)
Then he had to find someone to organize and run the winery while he remained in France, and, most importantly, someone who knew the unique U.S. market for wine, someone who could attract consumers who would appreciate the character of estate-grown wine.
With the shrewdness of many French businessmen he picked young Michaela Rodeno (right) to be the CEO. Michaela had come of age at Domaine Chandon, where she was the number two employee, a protégé of number one employee, founder John Wright. As Chandon began operations, Rodeno grew from helping Wright with everything to become the Vice President of Marketing seven years later. She helped change the perception of US consumers about sparkling wine from a cheap knock-off of Champagne to a pinnacle of wine making and raised the status of wine club members as vital to the winery’s success.
There are many women who run wineries in the U.S., in an industry where family ownership and operation is typical. But there are few women CEOs of corporate winery operations. With Rodeno’s focus on club customers and estate wines, St. Supery grew to be one of the top ten wineries in the Valley both in production and number of visitors. She also headed the sales and distribution operation for the Skalli family’s wines imported into the U.S. from the South of France.
In its early days, Napa Valley wines, as in Europe, were named for their place of origin, such as Burgundy, Chianti, Chablis, Rhine, and Rioja – or by brands names, such as Virginia Dare, Italian Swiss Colony, and Hearty Burgundy. As its reputation for fine wine grew, Napa Valley wine makers began naming their wines for the grape varietals they were made from, and established appellation controls for the origin of the grapes.
In the late 1990s Rodeno introduced St. Supery’s first departure from varietal wines to wine blends. Although not the first to do so, St. Supery is at the pinnacle of estate-grown Bordeaux blends, and the first winery to introduce brand names for them: Elu for red and Virtu for white. The wines are blended from grapes expressing the different clones, microclimates, and soils of the St. Supery vineyards. Virtu is recognized as the benchmark for white Bordeaux blends.(Below, Dollarhide Ranch vineyard on Howell Mountain planted with Bordeaux varietals for estate-bottled blends.)
St. Supery offers visitors unique experiences and well as wine. For those interested in the agriculture of wine, St. Supery has demonstration vineyards with a dozen grape varietals growing side by side, showing the differences in the grapes themselves, and their styles of trellising and pruning. A cutaway display of a typical grape vine plant shows how the roots penetrate the different the layers of soil in the Napa Valley.
For those who seek to understand the aromas that are used in tasting notes about wines, St. Supery offers the one and only “Smell-a-Vision”, a device that delivers puffs of air to a visitor’s nose, isolating the individual aromas linked to wine, such as grass, black cherry, cedar, and grapefruit.
Outside, St. Supery has created a typical French “Parc” with a court for the bowling game petanque, and a grassy lawn under a shady valley oak for al fresco wine club member events.
Rodeno retired as CEO of St. Supery in 2009, but remains a director of the Skalli family corporation, the only director that is not a Skalli family member. She was replaced as CEO by Emma Swain, who moved up from President to CEO, continuing St. Supery’s tradition of a woman boss.
Tasting room location: 8440 St. Helena Hwy., Rutherford, (Click here for a Google Map)
Wines: Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, oak-free Chardonnay, Moscato, red blend, white blend.
Vineyards: Dollarhide and Rutherford
List price range: $23 to $85
Related Articles:
Add a Comment
Single, married or something in between? Find what you need for Valentine's Day.
.jpg)
.jpg)
