2024 Napa Valley Wine Project Year in Review

We achieved a milestone platform this year reaching our 1,200th Napa Valley winery or brand personally visited, tasted with and profiled; for reference that coveted producer was Sylvan Lake. We added 41 new Napa Valley winery/brand profiles to this site in 2024 reaching 1,219 to date as of December 31, 2024. We have many brands to visit with still but very few physical wineries. For reference we have now archived more than 400 of our profiles because they are not producing wines anymore, moved their production outside of Napa County or were absorbed by another winery/brand.

Earlier in the year, we began consulting for a 300+ acre property in Carneros, owned by a Chinese based company. We helped organize a multi winemaker team and are currently assisting them in regards to all aspects of the wine business. We look forward to their opening of a restaurant, tasting room and retail space in Taipei; during our visit the interior was still under major renovation. We continue to assist several small Napa Valley brands in regards to sales and various exposure for their wines.

And promote the official wine club of the Napa Valley Wine Project, Dave’s Wines. We source a diversity of premium wines from boutique producers, primarily based in Napa Valley.

And on the vineyard front: we made our second vintage of Marselan from the vineyard block in Calistoga we conceived and are intimately involved with. And we almost secured live Odessky Cherny plants from Ukraine for Pine Ridge, but they did not clear customs despite following every stringent regulation, and unfortunately were sent back. But we were successful in shipping over over dormant cuttings this winter and they are already scheduled to be released by FPS in summer of 2026.

We keep a very low profile for this project, but when one of our favorite humans in the valley (Chris Morisoli) mentioned the possibility of being a guest on he and Hillary’s Nine One Wine Podcast, we agreed. We discussed wine, crime, travels and general Napa Valley going ons. This published on January 12, 2025.

One of our most in depth reviews, that of Silver Oak, reached more than 25,000 words this year and is currently our longest Napa Valley winery profile on the website. For reference, most of our reviews are between 2,000 to 5,000 words – and almost all have undergone significant updates and revisions since they were first published. Our reviews are not static.

Incidentally, we reached another 25,000 milestone this year – our 25,000th photograph posted on our Napa Valley Instagram account. It is truly remarkable the amount of photographs we post on this account, especially considering it was only activated in 2017.

For the first time ever we gave up on connecting with certain physical wineries in Napa Valley after years of trying to do so, and wrote detailed profiles based on our own outside research and tastings. The first two we added this year were of Aubert Wines and Joel Gott Wines; we had been to both wineries prior but under different ownership. We are quite happy with each of these two profiles.

This year we awarded our first and only 100 point score ever, to the 2021 Hertelendy Vineyards Legend Cabernet Sauvignon.

Thank you as always to Paul Franson of Napa Life for promoting our newly published reviews in his weekly newsletters.

Updating
One of the most significant parts of our project is adding tasting notes to existing reviews. Of all the time we spend on this project, this takes up a large portion of our time. Other than our winter break, wine is in our mouth almost every day as we continue to taste, write and add tasting notes to this site.

Once a year we review all of our profiles and identify the weakest reviews including those that need updated tasting notes. We create a list of these and then work our way through updating them in the subsequent year. Each year we generally identify 150-200+ of these. And by the end of the year we have significantly updated most of them plus many others through circumstance.

Splitting our time on this project is probably divided as 30% tasting and writing tasting notes, 30% general updating of existing reviews, 20% adding profiles of not yet reviewed brands to the site, and 20% traveling outside of Napa Valley visiting places and spaces connected through ownership or heritage to wineries/brands within Napa Valley and adding the resulting content to our existing reviews.

This doesn’t leave much time for anything else.

We use every opportunity possible to taste and update notes on our existing profiles. These include many industry events; we have become very adept at taking tasting notes on our phone at these gatherings. In addition we regularly visit wineries to purchase current release wines, local wine shops, many mornings tasting samples from the wine dispensers at Oakville Wine Merchant, COPIA and Greystone, Napa Valley Vintner’s events, attending select Wednesday winemaker nights at Cadet, attending the always excellent Friday evening tastings at Napa Valley College, and using the Coravin to sample and write about many bottles that wineries, friends and others in the industry provide us.

Highlight events were the Jameson Ranch Rescue auction (WineaPAWlooza!), the Collective Napa Valley’s Barrel Auction, Vintner’s Vanguard at Brasswood and the Oak Knoll District 20th Anniversary event at Materra Winery.

Always trying to stay updated on technology, we attended FIRA in Woodland in October. This conference showcases the latest and greatest in drone, electric and autonomous technology in terms of application in vineyards. It is remarkable how fast this type of technology has progressed in the past few years. It remains to be seen if it will take a foothold in mainstream farming of vineyards, instead, it may be complementary for some farmers.

Deceased in 2024
Every year we lose valuable contributors to Napa Valley’s wine industry; in 2024 we lost the following individuals:
Howard Backen
Craig Becker
Pablo Ceja
Eleanor Coppola
Timothy Darrin
Frank Husic
Elaine Jones
Don Luvisi
Beverly Rinaldi
Jan Shrem
Nena Talcott
George J. Vierra
Warren Winiarski

Napa Related Trips

Like every year, we travel to visit spaces or places outside of Napa Valley connected to wineries/brands within Napa Valley through ownership or heritage. This year we reached another milestone number, having now achieved more than 850 such visits. Our 800th visit was at Tenuta Foppa & Ambrosi in Brazil where on that same trip we also visited our 5th of the 6th Chandon’s around the planet. We also made a Pacific Northwest trip visiting many other places, several trips around California.

Later in the year we made a trip to Hungary, Italy, France, Portugal, Switzerland and the UK where we visited another approximately 30 places connected to wineries in Napa Valley including numerous birthplace villages of Napa Valley winemakers and winery owners.

Highlights from our Europe trip were varied including randomly visiting Anton Nichelini’s old home and the original family wine cellar, Domaine de Sandricourt (Clos du Val), Trifecta Winery, and St. Dunstans of the East Church + Gardens (Sterling Vineyards).

And while we were sitting on the banks of the Douro River in Porto we glanced over to one side and spotted Charlie Smith, the co-owner of Smith-Madrone Winery on Spring Mountain and his wife walking among the crowds. Imagine our surprise to randomly recognize someone from Napa Valley and his surprise when we walked over calling out his name.

Trips like these generate hundreds of photographs – we took nearly 3,000 photographs from this trip and used about 1/5 of them on the site.

For reference, at the end of 2024 we are using 36,190 of our own photographs on Napa Wine Project.

This year we also visited several satellite tasting rooms for Napa Valley wineries including Mullan Road Cellars (Cakebread) tasting room in Woodinville WA, the new HALL Palm Springs tasting room and One Acre’s tasting room in Dana Point.

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Six people we would love to meet and spend some time with in 2025 are Vitalie Taittinger, Christian Seely, Christian Moueix, Larry Turley, Daniel Baron and Nick Gislason. And two people we have the greatest respect for and would always like to spend more time with talking wine, history and life are Philip Togni and Dick Peterson.

Over and out from Thailand; cheers to a wonderful 2025 and see you stateside again in spring, refreshed, reset and rewound, ready to jump back into this project full throttle.