Pritchard Hill for a Pittance: Half-Off This Gorgeous Napa Cab!

To all Wine Exchangers,

There are more projects in Napa Valley going on these days than one can keep track of.  Some have already come and gone, others have yet to actually surface on the market still cozy in barrel, and others are evolving as they move forward.  Montagna, Italian for mountain, is a well situated winery that falls into that last category.  Mind you Montagna is no ordinary story.  They are located on what has been called the ‘Rodeo Drive of Napa Valley’, Pritchard Hill.  The ‘hill’, known for producing a bevy of Napa’s finest all-time Cabernets, has some pretty legendary inhabitants like Colgin ($500+ per bottle), Bryant Family ($550+), Chappellet ($200+), Tim Mondavi’s Continuum ($200+), David Arthur ($175+) and Ovid ($250+).  

How fancy a neighborhood is this?  Well we ran across an old Wine Spectator article by James Laube in May of last year talking about the listing of this property, with 32 acres planted to Cabernet (and some other amenities like caves and permits), at a cool $55 million.  Pritchard Hill is rare earth here in Cabernet country and the appellation isn’t all that big.  Fortunately, owner Bob Long had an ‘in’.  His parents had purchased 900 acres up here in the 1960s.  Bob himself was in the real estate business back in the day but was involved in founding a winery with his brother back in 1984.  That winery was David Arthur.

Bob began the Montagna story back in 2000 about a mile from David Arthur. There has always been a bit of a connection between David Arthur and Montagna.  When we first came across Montagna a few years back, it was marketed by the same folks down here as David Arthur.  The winemaker, Nile Zacherle, is also the winemaker at David Arthur.  That David Arthur/Pritchard Hill connection fostered some pretty high expectations on the winery’s part as to what they could charge for their wines. 

In Napa, much of the ‘magic’ is all about the air of exclusivity.  But sometimes you can make your wines too exclusive.  Also just because a wine is scarce doesn’t mean it’s necessarily great or worth a certain price relative to other choices in the marketplace.  Ultimately wine buyers, and the media, make that determination.  What we do know is that, for whatever reason, even at this wine’s not-crazy-for-Napa retail price of $60 per bottle, no one was beating a path to the door. 

Still, like we’ve said, it’s Pritchard Hill fruit in the hands of David Arthur’s (and Montagna’s) winemaker, and now those younger vines on the property aren’t so young.  So what’s the winery to do? Maybe, with the New Year, it seemed that it was time to devote these now-older vines to individual estate bottling their La Presa and Montagna Estate.  Why would they do that? Just speculation on our part but why get $60 for something that you believe, with some lower yields, better oak etc, you can realize $120 for? At some point you have to start playing with the big boys on the ‘hill’ pricewise. ‘Tre Vigneti’, their ‘value blend’, could have easily been perceived as a detriment to the Rolls Royce marketing the winery looks to be employing moving forward.

To that end the winery decided to eliminate their delicious, value-priced Tre Vigneti (‘three vineyards’) bottling and drastically cut the price even further to make it go away (it is interesting to note that by the time we got the offer, the 2012 Tre Vigneti was already no longer on the Montagna website).

The Montagna Cabernet Sauvignon Tre Vigneti 2012 is a blend of three blocks on their Pritchard Hill property, Montagna, La Presa, and Casadores.   Now ‘Montagna’ and ‘La Presa’ are sold separately, for $125 and $150 respectively while Casadores was re-planted for a Cal-Ital white wine program.  But even in the ‘past vintages wine archive’ section, some older vintages of Montagna and La Presa are noted as ‘sold out’.  As to the Tre Vigneti, there’s no ‘sold out’ list, or any indication that the wine ever existed.  That’s sooo 1984.

As always, we were willing to do our part to help make this wine go away.  The Montagna Cabernet Sauvignon Tre Vigneti 2012, at this new lower price, becomes one of the more impressive buys on a top flight Napa Cabernet with a 91 from Robert Parker and the following notes, “The 2012 Cabernet Sauvignon Tre Vigneti is the softest and most accessible of the Cabernet Sauvignons, with a dark purple color, notes of blackcurrants and creamy oak, a luscious, medium to full-bodied mouthfeel, excellent purity, and good texture and length. It is relatively dramatic and evolved, so drink it over the next 10-12 years.”

‘Dramatic’ Cabernet from arguably Napa’s top appellation in an outstanding vintage is, in itself, a very interesting proposition!  Pritchard Hill Cabernet for under $30 is more like a miracle in this day and age.  Take advantage.  As to the vineyard itself, we aren’t exactly up to date, but if you have an extra $55 million lying around…

Kyle Meyer and Tristen Beamon, Proprietors, Wine Exchange