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Begun in 1992 by Bruce and Barbara Neyers and their
winemaking partner, Ehren Jordan, Neyers Vineyards
produces about 15,000 cases of wine annually. About
25% of our production is Merlot, Cabernet Franc and
Cabernet Sauvignon grown on our 50-acre Conn Valley
ranch, managed by Maldonado Vineyard Management. We
purchase additional grapes from a select group of
growers, among them the Sangiacomo family of Sonoma
County, Will Nord of Napa, Cam Thieriot of Sonoma
Coast, Lee Hudson of Carneros, Rich Pato of Oakley,
and the Tofanelli family of Calistoga.
Ehren
Jordan, winemaker, returned to the Napa Valley in
1994 following a two-year stint in the Northern Rhone
town of Cornas, where he worked for Jean-Luc Columbo,
one of the most respected winemakers in Europe. His
training with Columbo not only expanded his technical
knowledge of winemaking, but more importantly served
to enlarge his scope of the craft, giving him a deeper
respect for the role of grape growing in this business.
Bruce’s
experiences over the past several years working with
Kermit Lynch Imports and a group of more than 100
French vintners have been important in shaping the
style of our wines. Most of these producers farm organically,
make their wines naturally without use of cultured
yeast or laboratory designed malo-lactic bacteria,
and are comfortable bottling their wines without filtration.
We have long admired their wines, and eagerly adapted
many of their practices.
In
1999, we purchased and renovated a winery on Sage
Canyon Road in the hills outside of Rutherford in
the Napa Valley. We produced our first vintage in
this facility in 2000.
In
2002, Wine and Spirits named Neyers Vineyards the
Artisan Winery of the Year. “Two . . . Chardonnays
ensured Neyers’ debut as W&S Artisan Winery
of the Year, one from Napa Valley, one from a single
vineyard in Carneros, both spectacular articulations
of what this varietal can be when grown in the right
place and handled with as little interference as possible
in the winery.”
Neyers
Vineyards sits in the heart of the Napa Valley but
Ehren’s experience as a winemaker in France and
Bruce’s experience with French wine importer
Kermit Lynch have had an undeniable influence on our
work. Many French wine producers farm organically,
make their wines naturally without use of cultured
yeast or laboratory designed malo-lactic starters,
and bottle their wines without fining or filtration.
We like their results and utilize many of their ideas.
The production of outstanding wine is invariably accompanied
by some degree of risk.
Our
barrels are made in France, to our specifications,
from wood that we buy at auction and air dry for three
years, a year longer than normal. All of our grapes
are picked by hand, into half-ton bins, then laboriously
hand sorted at the winery. Grapes that require a drive
of more than thirty minutes to our winery are delivered
in refrigerated trucks.
Our
Merlot comes entirely from our Conn Valley ranch,
and is grown organically in the Bordeaux inspired
vineyards surrounding our home. The combination of
cordon-pruned vertical-trellis system on a tightly
spaced planting grid serves to keep yields low and
quality high. The vineyard is planted to a traditional
mix of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon.
We harvest low yields at optimum ripeness, then ferment
for 30 days or more to insure maximum extraction of
color and flavor, which invariably gives us greater
complexity.
Our
Chardonnay grapes are not crushed, but slowly whole-cluster
pressed. The juice is racked directly into barrel,
then fermented naturally with indigenous wild yeast.
The process is time consuming and expensive, but it
produces a level of richness and complexity not found
in Chardonnay produced otherwise.
While
Syrah is less than 10% of our annual production, the
equipment to produce it takes up 50% of the cellar
space at our winery. We cold soak the must for up
to a week, and make no sulfur-dioxide addition at
harvest. Fermentation in custom-designed open-top
tanks enables us to vary the level of stem retention
for each lot of wine, and to manually ‘punch-down’
the cap, following the time-honored Rhône Valley
tradition.
Both
of our Zinfandel bottlings are from low-yielding old
vine sources. The Pato Ranch in Oakley was planted
in 1896 and includes some of the last remaining own-rooted
Zinfandel vines in California. The Tofanelli Vineyard
in Calistoga has a long and colorful history in the
area and has historically produced some of this variety’s
most respected wines.
All
of our wines are made with an eye for quality, and
a deep-seated passion for excellence. They are aged
with as little intervention as possible, and in most
years we bottle our wines with neither fining nor
filtration, using our custom designed, state of the
art mobile bottling line. No expense has been spared
in our grape growing, winemaking practices, or processing
equipment, yet customers repeatedly tell us that our
wines represent great value in today’s highly
competitive wine market. We hope you agree.
In
the fall of 1999, Bruce, Barbara and Ehren purchased
a 30-acre parcel in the Sage Canyon area of Napa Valley,
a few miles east of Rutherford on Highway 128, near
Lake Hennessey. Ehren oversaw the design and renovation
of the existing winery building into a fully equipped,
‘state of the art’ wine production facility,
a central processing and fermentation cellar separating
the two barrel storage cellars used for red and white
barrel aging respectively. Winemaking operations began
at the new facility in October of 2000 with the red
grape crush, and the entire 2001 vintage was produced
here. Having used mostly natural building materials
in the construction of the winery, the cluster of
buildings sits comfortably into a recess cut into
the rocky north slope of Pritchard Hill, alongside
Sage Creek.
In
late 1998, acting on a long-standing conviction, we
began to organically farm the vineyards on our Conn
Valley ranch in the hills east of St. Helena. With
the help of farming consultant, 'Amigo Bob' Cantisano,
along with our vineyard manager, Hugo Maldonado, we
became a completely organic property, returning to
the time-honored combination of hand and tractor hoeing
for weed control. A cover crop of vegetation rich
in nitrogen is now planted between vine rows to replace
nutrients depleted from the soil and to encourage
the spread of beneficial insects. At the same time,
we plant a ring of pest-attracting plants around the
vineyard to serve as an alternative habitat - an insect
'buffer zone' so to speak - for those creatures we
want to keep away from the vines. While we are, of
course, concerned about long-term soil health and
crop viability, and decreasing the use of pesticides
and synthetic fertilizers, we have also found that
sustainable farming produces richer, more complex,
and more flavorful fruit. Our Merlot 'Napa Valley'
reflects these huge dividends in wine quality.
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