A cab for the benefit of many
When it comes to wine, I’m pretty value driven. Turn me on to a nice $20 bottle (or less) of anything, and I’ll be your friend for life. Only on the rarest of occasions do I personally spend as much as $75 unless I’m paying off on a bet.
But I’m occasionally sent wines that cost a good bit more than that and, if they check enough boxes for me and/or my fellow Chronicle tasters, I’ll happily give them a twothumbs-up recommendation. At the end of the day, a bottle is worth as much as a person is willing to pay for it.
A recent “discovery” checked all the requisite boxes plus a bonus big one. At $150, the tiny-production terroir-driven C. Elizabeth Cabernet Sauvignons from a small, stony vineyard in the Oakville AVA can hardly be called bargains. But you’ll be buying more than wine for the first six weeks after the Feb. 1 release of the 2017 vintage: $75 of every bottle sold will go into the pockets of Napa Valley working folks who are trying to recover from two catastrophic gut punches.
COVID-19 was damaging enough in the early months of 2020, destroying wine tourism by shutting down restaurants, bars and tasting rooms, but the worst wildfire season in history followed — and that’s saying something considering how bad things got in 2017. That year, C. Elizabeth’s owners, Christi and Dave Ficeli, and their children were among the many in California’s fabled wine country who had to be evacuated from their homes on what turned into a nightmarish Labor Day weekend.
Houstonians can relate. Just as those flames began randomly engulfing neighborhoods from Santa Rosa in Sonoma County to the Vacas Mountains on the eastern border of Napa Valley, we were only beginning to grasp the full scale of the watery carnage wrought by Hurricane Harvey.
Though the Ficelis dodged the bullet in the end — “The fires came very close to us, but we got spared,” Dave said — they had to relive the horror last August and September as even worse conflagrations erupted anew. The smoke was so bad in their neighborhood they had to limit their kids to 10 minutes outside per day. Ultimately, some 8,000 separate blazes scorched nearly 6,000 square miles, destroying more than 7,000 structures — a couple of landmark wineries and the Michelin-starred Meadowood Resort’s restaurant among them — and killing at least 26 people.
Dave Ficeli recalled meeting with his winemaker, Bill Nancarrow, to sample the 2017 barrel lots as “the valley was burning around us. Here we were tasting these incredible ferments, but I had this tremendous conflict in my head and my heart. I was tasting one of the most amazing wines I’d ever been associated with while so many people we cared about were suffering. From that day forward, we talked about wanting to do more.
“Sitting at home with our kids, it was the same feeling (as 2017) all over again. We literally looked at each other and said, ‘What can we do?’ We decided to use our 2017 cab, which was tied so closely to so many tough memories, to do what we could to help all those hurt by the 2020 fires.”
To lend a hand, go to celizabeth.com. That’s the only place for now where the Ficelis’ wines can be had. Napa Valley sommelier/wine educator Christopher Sawyer called C. Elizabeth “a small brand with a big heart.”
Named for Christi — her middle name is Elizabeth, and there are several Elizabeths in the family tree, the Ficelis’ daughter included — the winery made only
244 cases of the
2017, and that’s still its biggest production in four vintages to date. The profit margin is narrow, to say the least. Still, should it all sell at what will becomes a 50 percent discount vis-à-vis the Ficelis’ bottom line, that’s OK by them. The way they see it, there are many more vintages to come and, yes, they’re in this for the long haul. They hatched the idea for C. Elizabeth over dinner in 2002. No shortcuts have been, or will be, taken. The 2014 and 2015 wines are technically sold out, but a few bottles from the library stash can likely be had, especially if one offers to purchase a vertical, which would prove instructive for seeing how different annual weather patterns and cellar tweaking account for dramatically different wines made from grapes grown in a very precise place. Well, two of them, actually, the Rock Pit Block and the Trailside Block within the Game Farm Vineyard. The former lives up to its name with stones covering the ground, “just like Châteauneufin du-Pape,” Nancarrow said.
Formerly with Duckhorn and Paraduxx, whose vineyards are across Rector Creek from the Game Farm Vineyard, he has been on board since Day 1. Christi, the great-great-greatgranddaughter of Colorado beer baron Adolf Coors, had hired him for her first wine project, the restoration of a derelict property that’s now the Goosecross winery, another boutique operation.
Nancarrow, who grew up in New Zealand and got his start in wine there, brought to C. Elizabeth a strong commitment to age his wines only in American oak. He has forged relationships with coopers in Missouri and Pennsylvania. In particular, four-year, water-bent, thin-stave wood from the latter has become the winery’s staple “for the additional textural elements it delivers to the wine,” he explains.
American oak is generally sweeter and contains more vanillin compounds than its French counterpart, thereby imparting stronger, more obvious aromas and flavors. Because of same, though, it takes a deft hand to rein in those characteristics.
Nancarrow is always tinkering. For example, with the 2016 vintage, he aged 85 percent of the wine in new oak. In 2017, however, that percentage dropped to 30 percent “to allow the enhanced fruit flavors of the vintage to shine through in the wine.” Tasting through a vertical of C. Elizabeth would be most instructive, and it will put that much more much-needed cash into the coffers of the nonprofit Napa Valley Community Foundation (napavalleycf.org) that’s serving as the conduit for the money, every dime of which, Christi emphasized, “will stay right here in Napa Valley.”
“It’s a lot of money,” she said, “but it’s something we felt we had to do. We’re getting back to work the best we can, but so many people are hurting. Some lost everything. They need help. We want to spread the word.”