Mayacamas Vineyards

One of Napa's historic mountain estates, founded in 1889 by John Henry Fisher, who built the stone winery high on Mount Veeder. Its modern reputation was forged by Bob and Elinor Travers, who owned Mayacamas from 1968 to 2013 and made it a byword for old-school, cellar-built Cabernet. In 2013 the estate was bought by the Schottenstein family, who invested in the vineyards and cellar while keeping the traditional style; Andy Erickson came on as consulting winemaker and Braiden Albrecht is the winemaker.

Estate vineyards sit high in the Mayacamas Mountains on Mount Veeder, planted between roughly 1,800 and 2,400 feet — above the Napa fog line — on volcanic and uplifted marine-sedimentary soils. The old mountain vines are dry-farmed, giving small crops of small, concentrated berries. Winemaking is deliberately traditional: fermentation across concrete, stainless steel, and oak, then long, slow ageing built around large neutral oak foudres and neutral French barriques with very little new oak, so the wines are structured and reductive in youth and made to age for decades. The original 1889 stone winery survived the October 2017 Nuns Fire that swept the mountain, though the estate lost an outbuilding.