San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Tiny Napa Valley shop sells best wines you don’t know
In St. Helena, Acme Fine Wines is a launchpad for the next cult offerings
“We rarely find the brands, they find us.”
Karen Williams, Acme Fine Wines
There’s an underground stock market for wine in Napa Valley. Tucked a few blocks from St. Helena’s Main Street, a tiny, little-known wine shop deals in a different kind of IPO: initial public offerings of the next cult wine brands that nobody has heard of yet.
Acme Fine Wines is not a place that tourists stumble into accidentally; it’s not even open on weekends, and you have to make an appointment to shop. Instead, it’s a kind of secret society for oenophiles. The region’s best winemakers and their proteges come here to sell their latest passion projects and side hustles — and the most prolific collectors of Napa Cabernet Sauvignon come for the bragging rights for discovering them before anyone else.
Over the last 20 years, Acme owner Karen Williams has developed a knack for scouting star power in wine long before the critics. As a result, her shop goes beyond the job of middleman and plays the unconventional role of incubator. Acme is known around Napa’s wine industry as “ground zero,” a place where some of the most sought-after, cult Cabernet brands of Napa Valley, including Scarecrow and Hundred Acre, got their start. Williams sold the latter’s Australian wine, Ancient Way Shiraz, through one of her wine clubs back when it was first released in 2007. She was also there for the early days of the Prisoner, which later sold to Constellation Brands for $285 million. Today it’s one of the top-selling wines in the country. Once it became too mainstream for Acme customers, she had to pull it from the shop.
Williams moved to Napa Valley in 1998 to pursue a wine career. She worked at the famed Tra Vigne restaurant and in wine production before starting her boutique shop, which she prefers to call a “wine gallery.”
“That’s what it looks like,” she said. “People often think they’re in the wrong place.”
It’s true. The whole space gives off a bit of a “look but don’t touch” vibe. Acme’s wines are not displayed on conventional wine racks or shelves; they’re placed individually in pastel-colored, wooden boxes attached to a pair of rustic, custom-made metal walls. The space is clean and uncluttered. Contemporary lounge furniture sits in the middle of the room, and by-appointment tastings are hosted at a large farm table.
Acme releases eight new wines — which she refers to as IPOs — each month to a mailing list of roughly 7,000 eager wine buyers. Cabernet Sauvignon is the shop’s focus, but Williams sells quite a bit of Pinot Noir, Chardonnay and even some more obscure varietals across her 300-bottle selection. Williams is incredibly selective, and only about 3 percent of the wines that her all-female team tastes make the gallery wall at Acme.
She makes most of her discoveries within St. Helena’s narrow borders: shopping at the town market, Sunshine Foods; while cheering her daughter on at high school games; and during bocce season. “We rarely find the brands, they find us,” she said. “Because I was sitting in the stands at the soccer game, I know about it.”
Williams unearthed one of her favorite IPOs, Drinkward Peschon, at a harvest party in the early 2000s. Everyone in attendance brought wine to share, and out of “hundreds of bottles,” she zeroed in on the one without a label. Eventually, she tracked down its creators: Lisa Drinkward and Francois Peschon, the 2019 San Francisco Chronicle Winemaker of the Year who has worked with noted brands like Araujo Estate and Vine Hill Ranch. It became one of the first wines Acme sold, and while Williams said it’s “still a best-kept secret,” many of her customers are now “super fans.”
New releases are dispersed among four themed clubs, like Pulse, which curates a diverse selection of grape varieties and winemaking styles for the most adventurous drinkers. While Acme customers are typically unfamiliar with the winery name of each new release, other details are sometimes more recognizable, like the winemaker or the vineyard source. Melanson Vineyard, for example, is in the Pritchard Hill region, Napa’s tiny, high-elevation crown jewel of Cabernet Sauvignon production. For two decades, the vineyard’s fruit has attracted Napa’s top winemakers, but recently, the owners decided to save some fruit
for themselves. They gave Williams the exclusive rights to sell their first release.
Club shipments don’t just come with traditional tasting notes. They’re packaged with compelling stories and facts about the owner, the winemaker, the vineyard and the vintage conditions. For the launch of Marnet’s Sonoma Coast Chardonnay, she explained why proprietor Dan Ricciato — a viticulturist who oversees more than 100 vineyards for renowned wine consultant Thomas Rivers Brown — decided to try his hand at winemaking. For Loner’s Pinot Noir, she described winemaker and music enthusiast Matthias Pippig as “a bit of a mad scientist” and included a few of his own suggested song pairings.
Williams gets wines years before retailers in much larger markets, like San Francisco or New York, and Acme is typically the first shop to sell these wines. “We’re not representing the big chip brands and the ones you can find driving on (Napa’s) roads,” she said. “They’re just getting their start, but we have the mailing list and that’s how it works really well — they need us, and we need something new to talk about.”
Once Acme launches an IPO, the store typically gets grandfathered into the brand’s future
releases — a valuable perk for Acme’s customers. That’s because once a winery reaches cult status, it becomes nearly impossible to buy their wines.
Brown has worked with Acme since its inception across many wine brands. Most recently, the shop helped launch a small project from Brown and a local grower called Caterwaul, which sells high-end Napa Cabernet for only $50 a bottle. “She just comes across as incredibly genuine. There’s not anything fake that tries to manipulate you,” Brown said of Williams. “With other shops, you sometimes feel a little dirty signing the contract.”
If anything, Williams is overly giving to her clients. She’s known to send her customers directly to the wineries — even though it likely means losing out on future sales. In exchange, she gets the owners’ loyalty, and future IPOs.
“It’s very rare in the retail business, and very cool and much appreciated,” said Brown. “It really does feel like a partnership.”
Acme Fine Wines. By appointment only. 9 a.m.-5 p.m. MondayFriday. 1080 Fulton Lane, St. Helena. acmefinewines.com