Striking building? Sumptuous tasting room? All this Napa winery offers is a pergola perched on the crest of a small hill, perfect views, and of course a superb cabernet sauvignon.
Trip to Napa: Ilsley
Wines from Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars have earned a prestigious reputation and are widely distributed and well known. What seems to be less well known among consumers is that Stag’s Leap is also the name of an entire wine district, an official American Viticulture Area, one of the Napa Valley’s smallest but most important appellations.
Stag’s Leap is quite a beautiful place. With rocky hillsides and palisades to the west, and the Napa River to the east, the district is barely a mile wide and two miles long, bisected by the Silverado Trail. Over 80 percent of its 1200 acres of cultivated land is, not surprisingly, planted with cabernet sauvignon.
On a recent trip to Napa, I found a world of variety in this small, easily navigated area. One of my more interesting discoveries was Ilsley Vineyards. In the unlikely event you see a bottle of Ilsley cabernet sauvignon on the shelves of your wine store, by all means buy it. Let me qualify my recommendation. Ilsley is a very good wine—but it is not one of the extraordinary collector’s cabernets coming out of Napa. It is not cheap at $48—but neither is it one of those breathtakingly expensive cult wines.
The wine has intensity, balance, finesse and charm, but it is the story behind it that makes it so special, and it is really a story of land and people. The hilly property planted with grapevines has been farmed by the Ilsley family for three generations. Primarily they sell their grapes to prestigious producers, including Robert Mondavi. But a few years ago they began producing very small quantities of wine under their own label.
Napa Valley wineries are known for their beautiful buildings, sumptuous tasting rooms and professional tasting staffs. Ilsley Vineyards has none of that. Their farm looks like a farm. Their wines are made at a nearby crush pad facility. Their tasting room, if you want to call it that, is an outdoor pergola on the crest of a small hill with splendid views overlooking their vineyards and the Vaca Mountains and Stag’s Leap Palisades beyond that. Their staff consists of the three Ilsley siblings who own and run the business, assisted by their now retired parents. Each of the two brothers has a day job in viticulture.
I visited on a late afternoon in November, a lovely time of year in Napa. After trudging up the hill between rows of trellised vines (there is no designated path) I arrived at the pergola, looked around, decided I was about as close to heaven as you get in everyday life, and realized my critical faculties were on hold.
There was no way I was going to be coldly analytical about a glass of wine while sitting there looking at the hillside vineyards close to me and in the distance the rocky outcroppings of the mountains in one direction or the green valley in the other, and the big sky above us. We talked about the wine itself now and then, but mostly we talked about land and life and the things that bring people together.
I might have been distracted from focusing totally on the wine for the whole experience was seamless, drinking the product of the land on the very land itself, feeling the same sunshine and breathing the air that nourished the grapes. But I paid enough attention to keep some tasting notes and a good memory of what was in the glass. The wine is consummately a Stag’s Leap District cabernet, supple, rich, with nuanced power and complexity, and balanced, soft tannins.
The Ilsley family produces only about 500 cases a year, but they have a New York distributor so you may spot the wine here and there in the retail market. They also sell on their Web site. Given their history of growing grapes and their relatively recent but excellent start in making wine, we can expect to see more of it in the future.
