Where to start with Mayacamas Vineyards? How about with the words of Eric Asimov: “A legendary purveyor of classically structured, ageworthy Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon.” Or perhaps Matt Kramer: “Really, you can’t do better than Mayacamas Vineyards for California wine profoundness.” Then, how about Antonio Galloni: “One of the most iconic estates of Napa Valley.” Or Jon Bonné: “Mayacamas Vineyards is among the classic wineries that have made California wines among the world’s finest.”

Even today, visiting this remote property feels like stepping into an alternate Napa universe. Rising to an altitude of 830 metres, Mount Veeder is part of the Mayacamas range, which separates Napa from Sonoma. This is wild country, an expansive collection of canyons, valleys and hillsides where fir, oak and redwoods shelter mountain lions, coyotes, deer and black bears. Among this beautiful wilderness lie Mayacamas’s 20 hectares of vines, mostly perched above the fog line, on hillside terraces known for producing the most distinctive wines of the Napa—“like a wild fish in a school of tank-raised trout”, as Matt Kramer once put it.

That Mayacamas managed to resist the prevailing high-octane style of Napa Cabernet in the ’90s and beyond—one that emphasises crude power and soft tannins—owes as much to the stubbornness of Bob Travers as it does Mount Veeder’s potent volcanic terror. Traver’s arrived on the mountain in 1968 and quickly built a reputation for intense yet graceful terroir-rich Cabernet wines that aged as well as Bordeaux’s finest. The rudiments of Traver’s time-honoured artisanal methods—low yields, dry farming, early picking, brisk ferments and long aging in large, old oak foudre—remain the overriding blueprint for Mayacamas today.

Before his retirement, Bob Travers described this mountain wine as intense but never showy. “Our vineyards are among the highest on the mountain. In fact, most of the vines on Mount Veeder have sunlight all day, yet it doesn’t get too hot here because of the breezes that come straight off the bay; temperatures rarely get into the 30s,” he said. “An inversion—our cool air flows down the valley, their warm air rises here—keeps us temperate at night, too. Because the vines rarely shut down, whether hot or cold, our wines have great concentration when compared to others from the Napa.”

If California had a Hall of Fame for winegrowers, Travers would be one of its greatest stars. He eventually retired in 2013, selling the estate to the Schottenstein family, who installed Braiden Albrecht as winemaker and Phil Coturri as their viticultural star. Far from watering down the Mayacamas style, as some in the industry feared, the new owners have doubled down to preserve Travers’ legacy. Under Coturri, the vineyard has seen extensive replanting over the last decade, replacing the ailing, phylloxera-afflicted AXR-rooted vines with mass-selection cuttings from the vineyard’s best vines. The parcels have also been redesigned, placing the Chardonnay block on the mountain’s cooler slopes. Today, the farming is 100% certified organic, with roughly half the vineyards given over to no-till viticulture. 

Little has changed in the old stone cellar since Bob Travers took control in the late 1960s. Albrecht has installed cooling equipment to stabilise fermentations and lengthen macerations, and introduced a few 600-litre oak barrels. But much remains the same. The fruit is harvested by hand early and over multiple passes to preserve natural, altitude-derived acidities. The alcohols usually end up between 13 and 14%. The wines ferment mainly in open-top cement vessels built in the 1940s. Extended aging occurs exclusively in neutral oak, typically for 36 months. The wines usually spend a further two years in bottle before they are released to the market.

Braiden Albrecht believes this staunchly traditionalist approach has as much to do with the wine as any other part of the estate. “I do think if you took our grapes and made the wine in the same way in another cellar, the wine would be different,” he says. “No doubt.” Importantly, despite the onset of warmer conditions, the wine’s brightness and energy—its Mayacamasness—shines through. Those who know the estate best tell us that while the recent warmer vintages reveal riper tannins and more depth in the flavour spectrum, the wines are also evolving to become ever more precise and detailed, largely thanks to the progress in the vineyard.

Many years ago, Californian wine’s enfant terrible, Randall Grahm, opined that most of his state’s wines were less about sense of place and more about achievement; “they are vins d’effort, rather than vins de terroir,” he wrote in a lecture titled The Phenomenology of Terroir. But then, what goes around, occasionally comes around. Even in a region where money talks and terroir walks, the Napa’s pendulum is swinging back to more elegant and balanced wines; wines reflective of their place. And so, once again, Mayacamas finds itself at Napa’s cutting edge. We’ll leave the last words to Antonio Galloni: “These magnificent Cabernet Sauvignons capture an artisan spirit from a long-gone era in Napa Valley that is only now being rediscovered and fully appreciated for what it is: one of the richest legacies in Napa Valley, the United States and the world.”

For more information on Mayacamas’s rich history, vineyard and winegrowing, check out the winery’s detailed website.