ST. HELENA, Calif. — Great wines are almost always surprising. Sometimes, they seem to make no sense at all.
That’s how I felt on a visit to Heitz Cellar here in mid-August for a retrospective tasting of Heitz cabernet sauvignons that stretched back to the 1972 vintage. The 18 bottles poured included single-vineyard wines from both Trailside and Martha’s Vineyard, a hallowed site in Oakville, Calif., as well as the Napa Valley blend. All were 100 percent cabernet.
One of the older wines, a ’73 Napa Valley blend, was fresh and lively, yet sedate and gentle, with flavors of herbs, red fruits and sarsaparilla. It was remarkable for a 46-year-old wine that probably sold for around $6 a bottle.
The Heitz Martha’s Vineyard 1985, a celebrated vintage, was fresh, balanced and complete, with the prominent mintiness that is characteristic of the Martha’s Vineyard wines. A ’91 Trailside Vineyard was dark and earthy, with lovely, lingering flavors.
These wines were superb. But to the contemporary way of thinking about wine, or at least my way of thinking, they were hard to figure. The Heitz method of making cabernet sauvignon, with a premium on high acidity and low pH, runs counter to many cherished current beliefs about how great wine ought to be produced.
Many Napa cabernets might have been made with similar methods back in the 1970s. But today? Heitz is practically singular.
Half a century ago, since shortly after Joe and Alice Heitz bought a small property in 1961 in St. Helena, Calif., Heitz Cellar’s cabernet sauvignons, particularly its Martha’s Vineyard bottles, were among the most prized wines produced in Napa Valley.
Despite this early acclaim, Heitz today is rarely mentioned among the Napa Valley elite, having long been overshadowed by the rise of Napa’s cult cabernet producers. These tiny operations, which came to prominence in the 1990s, have parlayed scarcity and exorbitant prices to become Napa’s most coveted bottles.
Producers like Heitz, who despite occasional troubles have stood the test of time (and elsewhere might have been elevated to pantheon status), were eclipsed by wines that seemed to fit a more modern aesthetic.
Mr. Heitz died in 2000. Two of his children, David Heitz and Kathleen Heitz Myers, ran the business until last year, when they sold the business to Gaylon Lawrence Jr., an agricultural magnate from Arkansas.
Mr. Lawrence appointed Carlton McCoy Jr., 35, a young but celebrated American sommelier, as president and chief executive, and gave him the task of both charting a course back to prominence for Heitz and envisioning its path over the next 15 years. His daughter Westin Lawrence came aboard as marketing and public relations liaison.
It might have been tempting for Mr. Lawrence, in the way of other new, wealthy owners of Napa Valley vineyards, to turn Heitz into a vanity project. Success might have been judged by measuring Heitz against other Napa baubles belonging to the tycoon cohort.
Instead, Mr. McCoy says, Mr. Lawrence has simply entrusted the Heitz team to do whatever it needs to do to make the best possible wines squarely in the Heitz tradition, or, as Mr. McCoy put it, “understanding the significance of what we have and preserving it.”
Brittany Sherwood, who joined Heitz in 2012 straight out of the viticulture and oenology program at University of California, Davis, and who learned under David Heitz, has stayed on as winemaker. The biggest immediate change is that Heitz, which Mr. McCoy said has farmed organically since the 1980s, is converting 425 acres to biodynamic viticulture.
A visit to Heitz’s winemaking facility in Spring Valley, an almost hidden nook off the Silverado Trail, is like entering a time machine to 1970s Napa Valley, the dawn of the modern era of California wine production. Perhaps even then, the Heitz methods were considered eccentric.
Joe Heitz wanted to make age-worthy reds, and considered acidity, not tannins, the essential ingredient to long aging. On the pH spectrum — which measures how acidic or basic substances are on a 0-to-14 scale, with under 7 being acidic — Mr. Heitz aimed for 3.3 to 3.4 in his cabernets.
In 2019, Heitz still aims for that mark, even as other Napa cabernets today customarily come in at lower levels of acidity, with pHs around 3.8 to 4.0.
Many Napa producers today pick their grapes at high levels of ripeness, when they are full of sugar and the acidity in the fruit has dropped. They then add tartaric acid in the winery to lower the pH, and add water to lower the alcohol level.
Heitz’s method of viticulture and trellising aims to achieve ripeness when the acid and sugar levels in the grapes are more balanced. Yet Heitz still routinely adds tartaric acid in the winery. More surprising, in a step taken by few producers of fine red wines anywhere in the world, Heitz blocks the malolactic fermentation in which tart malic acid is converted into softer lactic acid.
Many white wine producers, particularly in warmer climates and with certain grapes like riesling, will block malolactic fermentation in an effort to preserve freshness. But almost no red-wine producers do this, except Heitz.
For someone like Mr. McCoy, who was the wine director at the renowned Little Nell hotel in Aspen, Colo., and passed the Master Sommelier exam in 2013, I imagined this would be shocking.
Contemporary thinking, abetted by sommeliers and critics, is that minimal intervention is the best approach for winemakers. But Mr. McCoy says he has learned that wine is too complex for generalizations.
“Wine is such an incredibly complicated beverage, any sweeping statement you make is going to be wrong, no matter what it is,” he said. “I’m ashamed of some of the generalizations I’ve made over a glass of wine in the past. We have to be more openhearted and understanding.”
Besides, he said, the evidence is the wines themselves. “You’ve got the result: They’re delicious, and they age incredibly well,” he said.
This is true. Of the 18 wines tasted, all more than 20 years old, only one, a Trailside from the polarizing 1997 vintage, seemed to be dissipating. Otherwise, these wines were generally lively, graceful and beautifully integrated.
Among the other highlights for me were a 1982 Napa Valley, with bright, high-toned flavors; an earthy, herbal 1995 Trailside; and a bright 1972 Martha’s Vineyard, in which the mintiness was underscored by a baritone fruit note.
These would not be mistaken for contemporary wines. They are perhaps a tad rustic, and the beloved acidity may one day be the last thing remaining, like the Cheshire cat’s grin. But they are delicious.
Heitz’s winemaking methods today are largely the same, and the wines are just as lively. The cabernet is fermented in steel tanks. When it is almost finished with the fermentation, it is pressed off into large upright tanks made of American oak and redwood, manufactured in the early 1960s and purchased by Heitz in the ’80s.
The wines rest in the tanks for about a year before they are moved to small barrels of French oak, where the Napa Valley blend ages for two years and the single-vineyards for three. In all, the Napa is aged for four years before it’s released — 2014 is the most recent vintage available — and the single-vineyards for five years. It’s another quirk. Many 2016 Napa cabernets are already in the market, and some 2017s as well.
Ms. Sherwood, the winemaker, said that while the overall process remained the same, there have been changes since she arrived in 2012, “always to improve the wine.”
Many of the modifications made by the new ownership, Mr. McCoy said, have come in the vineyard in an effort to find the properly balanced yield, and fruit that needs as little manipulation as possible beyond the addition of tartaric acid.
In the winery, he said, the changes have been small tweaks, aimed at improving the texture of the wine and working in a less formulaic way, depending on the needs of a particular wine.
For example, the Heitz chardonnay, which we did not taste, had historically been bottled young. Ms. Sherwood determined the wine would be better with more aging before it was released, but that meant the Heitz chardonnay would be out of the market for a year. The new owner Mr. Lawrence, Mr. McCoy said, was fine with that.
“If we were struggling, it would be a problem,” he said. “It’s a luxury to be able to do that without financial pressure.”
For Mr. McCoy, the leap from sommelier to wine executive has required some fast learning. He had gotten to know Mr. Lawrence at the Little Nell, where he had been a regular guest, and when Mr. Lawrence was considered buying a Napa property, he sought Mr. McCoy’s advice. One thing led to another, and he was offered the job.
Among the first things he had to do, he said, was shed the sommelier’s air of omniscience.
“There’s pressure to have an opinion about everything,” he said. “One of the greatest assets I had was coming in here from a position of absolute ignorance.”
“Because I knew so little, people have been much more accepting of me asking an enormous amount of questions,” he said. “That might not have happened if I had been president of another big wine company.”
This was not his first time in that position. Mr. McCoy grew up in a tough neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Through the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, he earned a scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America. There, he heard vocabulary that he had never encountered before, like mirepoix and consommé.
“It forced me to shut up and listen,” he said.
For wine writers encountering paradoxical wines like the Heitz cabernets, it’s not a bad lesson.
