New Napa vintner building sizable estate
“They’re glad that I’m not building a new winery.”
Vintner Suzanne Deal Booth on how neighbors are reacting to her plans for Napa Valley
Suzanne Deal Booth hasn’t released any wine yet, but the new vintner is already looking like an ambitious player in Napa Valley. This week, Booth announced the purchase of her third property in the valley’s prestigious Rutherford district, a 1.4acre parcel formerly home to the wellknown Swanson Vineyards. The price was $10 million.
The addition of this property at 1271 Manley Lane in Rutherford brings Booth’s total holdings to 32.6 acres. She bought her first parcel, the famous Bella Oaks Vineyard, in 2010, and added a contiguous property, part of Fahrig Ranch, in 2015. The new parcel is not directly adjacent to the first two, but is separated by another family’s 4acre property.
Booth’s entrance into the wine market will be bold, even by pricey Napa Valley standards: The first vintage of Bella Oaks Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon — 300 cases from the 2018 vintage — will be released this September for $275 a bottle. (One recent estimate put the average price of a Napa Valley Cabernet or red blend at $113.50.) The winemaker is Nigel Kinsman, who for years was the winemaker for “cult” Cabernet producer Araujo.
Thirtytwo acres is not a huge land holding compared with longtime Napa estates; a larger winery like Inglenook, about a mile north of Bella Oaks Vineyard, controls 1,700 acres. But it’s an impressive land grab for this day and age, when prime vineyard land in a place like Rutherford is scarce. Vineyard land in Napa Valley can sell for anywhere from $300,000 to $350,000 an acre, according to some estimates.
Still, the appeal of the new property, which will now also be known as Bella Oaks, isn’t the acreage — it’s that it is already permitted for a winery and tasting room on site, thanks to Swanson.
Such permits are expensive and cumbersome to obtain in Napa Valley these days, and almost always meet with opposition from community members. In this very neighborhood, residents have recently protested a proposal from Staglin Vineyards to expand its visitor capacity. It’s likely that the permit added to the value of the land parcel.
But Booth said the neighbors on Bella Oaks and Manley lanes have received her news well. “They’re glad that I’m not building a new winery,” she said, but rather taking over an existing one. The use permit allows for 42,500 gallons of wine production annually (so far, Kinsman has been making the wine at a shared facility, Wheeler Farms), and 25 vehicles per day can come for wine tastings by appointment only.
She plans to renovate the Swanson facility significantly, and it may be years before a tasting room opens to the public. “Their tasting room faced an interior garden and a parking lot,” Booth said. “I want to change the orientation so that you can see the hills and the surrounding vineyard.”
The Swanson family had first built the winery in the 1980s, and in 2015 they sold the property and the brand to Vintage Wine Estates, which subsequently closed the tasting room to the public. Notably, Vintage Wine Estates is planning to go public, a rarity in the California wine industry.
Booth, who has lived between California and Texas for many years, is an art collector and is involved with numerous art conservation organizations. She was visiting her friends Garen and Shari Staglin of Staglin Vineyards in 2009 when they went for a walk through the neighborhood and she saw Bella Oaks Vineyard. It was already a wellknown vineyard in the Napa Valley wine industry, planted in the 1960s by Belle and Barney Rhodes. The acclaimed producer Heitz Cellar made wine from Bella Oaks Vineyard fruit.
Soon after that walk, she learned it was for sale. The Rhodeses had sold Bella Oaks Vineyard to a cousin for a reported $7 million in 2008, and Booth bought it from the cousin for an unknown price. She has since replanted the original vineyard, and is in the process of converting it to biodynamic farming practices. The second parcel she purchased needed some rehabilitation, Booth said, and she’ll plant 10 acres of new vines this year.
She said that her background in art preservation has informed her commitment to land preservation, too. “I’m trying to do this holistically by being mindful of the environment, the neighborhood, the country lane,” Booth said of her plans for these land parcels. “And instead of building a de novo winery, I’m buying this one and renovating it because it’s already part of the landscape.”