Producer profile: Newton Vineyard
This Napa Valley winery has had a rollercoaster journey since it was founded in the 1970s. Elin McCoy visits Spring Mountain to discover the vision of its current owners and plans for the future
70 Elin McCoy visits Napa Valley to find out more about this Spring Mountain estate
GLOSSY BLACK DINNER plates inscribed in glowing gold with Newton Vineyard’s iconic ‘Pino solo’ logo graced the Napa winery’s official 40th anniversary event last spring, but the stars were in the glasses: three brand-new, stunning, single-vineyard Cabernets.
As we savoured Newton’s future, JeanGuillaume Prats, the architect behind the winery’s new Cabernet direction and CEO of Moët-Hennessy’s Estates & Wines division, wore a pleased but slightly anxious smile.
When he took on his lVMH role at the end of 2012, his biggest concerns were two projects: Ao yun, a new winery in China, and Newton. ‘it needed a lot of help,’ he confided. ‘And it needed it in a year.’ Now that the 2014 vintage of these new Cabernets is on the market, i think Newton is on its way back.
one of California’s trailblazing estates in the 1980s and 1990s, Newton lost focus in the 21st century. As cult wineries and new projects in Napa grabbed attention, and prices of $200 and up became the new normal, the winery failed to keep pace. located in the middle of prime Cabernet territory, Newton had helped to fuel a Merlot craze and its most famous wine was a Chardonnay. Winemakers came and went, as did various cuvées that were often stylistically clumsy, lacking flair and distinctive character. Despite its long (by California standards) history, Newton was no longer part of the Napa fine wine conversation.
it probably didn’t help that Newton was in the spring Mountain District AVA, which has never enjoyed the renown of other districts such as stags leap, or the famous benchland vineyards of oakville and Rutherford.
in fact, i’d long wondered how Newton’s reds and whites could sit with the lVMH upper-luxe model, heavy on perfectionist properties such as Château Cheval blanc in bordeaux and Clos des lambrays in burgundy.
so i headed to Napa last autumn to discover how Prats and Rob Mann, the young, muchbuzzed-about Australian winemaker he recruited from lVMH’s Cape Mentelle in Margaret River, had turned it around.
Dramatic setting
As i followed the twists and turns of Madrona Avenue in glitzy west st Helena and climbed to Newton’s steeply terraced vines, i reflected on how much the Prats-Mann duo had to build on. let’s start with Newton’s truly magnificent setting in the spring Mountain District. its vineyards range from 150m to 490m in elevation. The view from the winery terrace takes in distant ridges, drifting wisps of clouds and rippling rows of vines hugging hillside contours like green ribbons. Avid horticulturists are always wowed by the winery’s gorgeous formal parterre garden with its neat box hedges, more than 30 varieties of rose, tall italian cypresses and juniper topiary trimmed like corkscrews.
‘The parterre garden has neat box hedges, 30 varieties of rose, Italian cypresses and topiary like corkscrews’
Other landmarks – a red British telephone box, a red-lacquer Chinese gate, a cedar pagoda – reflect the founders’ English and Chinese heritage. Prescient British paper entrepreneur Peter Newton, who died in 2008, was the Napa pioneer who started Sterling Vineyards in 1964 and sold it to Coca-Cola in 1977. He and his Manchuria-born wife Dr Su Hua Newton bought the 219ha property that became Newton, and persuaded Sterling’s winemaker Ric Forman to join as a partner.
Their very grand vision was ahead of its time: it even included an intricate network of caves tunnelled into the mountain. The 45ha of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot and Petit Verdot were planted in more than 100 separate blocks to mirror the property’s surprising variety of exposures and soil types. Sadly, Forman and the Newtons quarrelled, and the partnership unravelled.
Winemaker John Kongsgaard, who arrived in 1983, rewrote the rules for Californian Chardonnay with big, densely textured examples that owed a lot to Burgundy. One of the state’s first unfiltered whites, it quickly came to define the winery. (Several hotshot winemakers, such as Aaron Pott and Andy Erickson, got their start at Newton under him.)
Back then Newton was one of the star wineries of Spring Mountain, established as an AVA in 1993. But after Kongsgaard left in 1997, the style of the wines drifted, as winemakers stayed in the background, with Hua Newton out front, even after LVMH bought a majority share in 2001.
Bringing Newton back
When Newton died in 2008, LVMH took complete control, but revitalisation only started with Prats, who’d spent most of his working life running Bordeaux second growth Château Cos d’Estournel. He knew what was happening in Napa; before the financial crash in 2008, he was orchestrating the purchase of Chateau Montelena for Cos’s owner, but the deal fell through.
His diagnosis of Newton: ‘For 16 years, not enough attention had been paid to the core estate wines,’ he says. ‘The vineyards needed huge reinvestments, and the winery required a new vision and a dynamic new team.’
The first part of the transformation was about shifting wine style and repositioning the winery as a luxury estate. Prats pushed for a fresher, brighter unfiltered Chardonnay and refocused the estate on making top Cabernet Sauvignon. He spun off Newton’s lower-priced ‘red label’ wines to a separate new brand, Skyside, to be made elsewhere.