It was another extremely busy year in Napa Valley; we visited, tasted with and profiled 40 new Napa Valley wineries/producers bringing us to a total of 1,259 now completed for the Napa Wine Project. For reference, that was only one less than the previous year. We continued to taste up and down the valley most every day and updated the majority of our active winery profiles. A significant part of that updating was tasting through the 2021-2023 vintages to keep tasting notes current.
Our profiles on this site have *never* been more updated than they are right now. And while in 2025 we added numerous tasting notes of current release wines to our existing profiles, in 2026 in addition, we also want to taste a larger set of older wines (in the 15-40+ year post vintage range) and add subsequent tasting notes.
We continue to add new wines to Dave’s Wines, THE CLUB focusing primarily on wines from smaller Napa Valley producers. You can join one of our club memberships or purchase wines directly from our site. And this year we participated in several fun evaluatory blind tastings for both this club and other private clubs with our business partner Dave and other wine enthusiasts.
Our longest profile is still Silver Oak at over 28,000 words. Our goal is to taste and note every vintage of Silver Oak Cabernet Sauvignon ever produced, from both Napa Valley and Alexander Valley. We hope to reach over 30,000 words this coming year for this particular profile. If we ever find the time, we would love to write a book titled, The Incredible Story of Silver Oak.
We don’t want to have any regrets about this project; we continue to devote all resources available to us, including significant time, money, our inherent persistence, resilience and obsessiveness, and utilizing our connections formed over the past 20 years to build and maintain this content.
We love the fact we keep a close eye on the pulse of Napa Valley and its ever-evolving wine scene. And remarkably we have been able to create well under the radar of any media or other public exposure. And we have been able to offer this as a free resource to the general public without ever charging for access to the content or sprinkling the site with paid advertising.
We have only two more prominent physical wineries to visit in Napa Valley. They are Screaming Eagle and Hundred Acre. We still have many brands to visit with; they come and they go. And certainly still a few physical wineries in the industrial/business parks in and around the city of Napa, several bonded spaces up valley and a few physical wineries we need to revisit since change in ownership. But at this stage of the project, we have visited and profiled by far the vast majority of physical wineries in Napa Valley.
After nearly twenty years, we finally connected with and profiled two small producers we originally reached out to early on in our project, Chateau de Vie and Maybach.
We have decided that when we score points on finished wines, in the future we will only be assigning points that incorporate a 2-4 point differential. For example, we scored 98-100 points for the 2023 Platt Vineyard Estate Reserve Chardonnay earlier this year which was one of the most exceptional Chardonnays we sampled in 2025. And Platt Vineyard was our final of the AXA Millésimes owned wineries/brands we had left to visit.
And for the record, we have now archived more than 430 of our profiles because they have stopped producing, moved out of the county in some cases or were absorbed by larger brands. This list also includes stand alone tasting rooms which have closed over the years. But mostly it reflects the challenging economics of running a small brand. And in the nearly 20 years we have been working on this project, we removed another nearly 300ish Napa Valley brand listings from our very updated public database that we never had a chance to meet and profile.
Third vintage of our Marselan, currently aging in barrel
Especially enjoyable this past year was connecting and getting to know several vineyard management companies and or soils or viticulture experts.
And we have fun on the side, connecting buyers with brands in Napa Valley to try and push through some sales for them. Its not always successful but we do dedicate a small amount of time each year for this.
As of the end of 2025, we are using 39,225 of our own photographs on Napa Wine Project. And speaking of photography, we reached our milestone 30,000th photograph posted to our Napa Instagram account, where quantity is most definitely valued over over quality. In fact, we don’t really recommend anyone follow it as for 9 months, it is a daily constant barrage of images and information overload.
For reference, here is a list of others who have used our photographs in their publications:
7×7 Magazine, A Must Read Blog, Appellation St. Helena, Atlas Peak AVA, Bravo Your City, Brojure (YPO), Cellar Pass, CRU Wine Bar, Cultured Vine, Daily Mail, Dave’s Travel Corner, Drink the Bottles, Ficofi, Frog’s Leap Winery, Helena View Johnston Winery brochure & website, Ian Blackburn, Ilikethisgrape.com, Insider.com, LAexcites, Monticello Vineyards, Napa Tourist Guide, Napa Valley Life (article and a separate Monticello winery ad), NapaValley.com, Napa Valley Insider, Napa Valley Uncorked, Napa Valley Wine Group (FB), Paul Franson’s NapaLife, Premiere Napa Valley, Priority Wine Pass, Serendipity Wine Distributor, Spoto Wines, St. Helena Historical Society, The Angela Edit, The Napa Crush, Tish Around Town, Travel Notes, Vines of Napa, VinoVisit, Visit Calistoga, We Said Go Travel, Wine Cellar Park, WineDNapa, Wine Folly, Wine Pig, Wine Traveler, Wine-Searcher, Yelp and on numerous social media platforms.
We want to shoutout to three wonderful employees at Oakville Wine Merchant, Steve, Jack and Kel (and Andy who left in 2025 to pursue other opportunities). We try to visit once every 4-6 weeks when we are in the valley, specifically for tasting certain wines to update tasting notes on reviews on this website. Our favored times are either Monday or Tuesday mornings right when they open, days that are fairly quiet.
We spend several hours at our favorite table slowly tasting through select bottlings. This is our therapy, a time when we can enjoy and note the wines at our own pace, but we don’t mind the invariable interruptions and to some extent we look forward to them. We often see other winemakers and those we recognize who work in the trade. Sometimes we help out stray tourists who have questions about the valley. Its a place to catch up on local gossip and the latest happenings in the local wine industry. We always look forward to our valuable time here.
To Tom Jarman of Destination Napa Valley, a great guy and a huge supporter of what we do. To Atlas Peak Appellation in particular for recognizing our work. And always to Paul Franson.
And thank you to all the wineries, including all the trade/industry discounts; that helps immensely.
Requests for 2026
We value when wineries link back to our profiles or share among their followers. And thank you to all wineries who have already done so. That means a lot.
More trade/industry/consumer tastings focused on Napa Valley wines, please. Part of our continuous updating comes from attending these tastings throughout the year. We highly value any trade invites for such tastings, especially those hosted by Napa Valley’s individual sub appellations or the Napa Vintners. We will do our best to attend if our schedule allows. We update our tasting notes at these events, reconnect with vintners, sometimes meet brands we haven’t yet profiled, network, and get reinspired about what we are doing.
Eight people we would love to spend some time with in 2026 are Vitalie Taittinger, Christian Seely, Christian Moueix, Larry Turley, Chris Hyde, Nick Gislason, Mark Aubert and Jayson Woodbridge.
Napa Wine Related Trips
We have now visited more than 950 places or spaces outside of Napa Valley, around the planet, with some connection through ownership or heritage to wineries in Napa Valley. Content from the results of these visits is added directly to our existing winery profiles. And with a little luck, we will reach 1,000 such places by the end of 2026, another significant milestone in our project.
A couple of highlights early in the year were touring the Red Boat Fish Sauce factory in Phu Quoc, Vietnam with the founder, Cuong Pham (Đồi Đá Wines), our first of what will be a number of visits to Meyer culinary spaces (Hestan Wine) – this one was the Meyer Showroom in Bangkok, a visit to Shenzhen, China to try a bottle of 2018 Tusk Cabernet Sauvignon that our friend graciously opened and a visit to Taipei to see a private members club focused on food and wine. And on another trip to Bangkok we met up with a friend we first met in Napa Valley in 2007; he is now living in Bhutan. We put in place plans to bring some cuttings of Marselan into that country for the first time, to be grafted at an experimental vineyard owned by Bhutan Wine Company.
In April, we pushed our own limits with an intense trip through the Southern and Eastern U.S. Over just eight days, we covered 14 states and visited 33 locations tied to Napa Valley wineries through ownership or heritage. A couple of our favorite stops included locating the original site of the Gleason Barn in New Hampshire, now located on the Nickel & Nickel property, a visit to Marshfield to research the roots of the Bump family (Darms Lane Winery), dinner at VintEdge (Napa Jack Wines) in New Jersey, lunch and dinner at Jonathan’s Grill and Rutledge in Nashville/Franklin, Tennessee (Revelette Wines) and the Trestle 31 tasting room and property in Geneva, New York (Fiadh Ruah Wines).
In July we popped over to China, our third time this year to that country and finally checked off a visit to CHANDON China in Ningxia, the last of the 6 Chandon winery properties needed to visit around the globe. Completing visits to all 6 of these properties has been extremely gratifying with some of our most memorable outside of Napa Valley experiences occurring at CHANDON. We also popped down to Bangkok and met with Edmund from BRYANT ESTATE.
In October we were in the United Kingdom visiting places and spaces connected to wineries in Napa Valley. A highlight was a visit to the recently opened Domaine Evremond in Kent owned by the Taittinger family, our second visit to that property but first to their winery. For the first time in quite some years, unfortunately we did not make it to France. In November we made an intense trip to southern California doing what we do. Can’t wait for the two Los Angeles GOTT locations to open in 2026.
In December we found ourselves basking in the warmth of late spring in Argentina and Chile, return trips to both countries visiting additional wineries with connections to wineries in Napa Valley including Finca Decero (Cuvaison). And immediately following this, a very quick trip to California’s central coast to visit a number of spaces and places connected to Foley Family Wines & Spirits and Fess Parker Winery.
Sadly we lost the following individuals strongly connected to Napa Valley’s wine industry in 2025:
Bill Sorenson (Burgess)
Bill Wolf (Eagle Eye)
Bob Steinhauer (Beringer)
Brett DelBondio (Del Bondio)
Don Baker (Sciandri)
Donald Bryant (Bryant Family)
Carl Doumani (Stags’ Leap)
Dean Sylvester (Whitehall Lane)
Frank Farella (Farella)
Fred Fisher (Fisher)
Farhad “Fred” Razi (Razi)
Greg Harris (Paradigm)
Helen Bacigalupi (Bacigalupi, Sonoma)
Jim Laube (Wine Spectator)
Jesus Madrigal (Madrigal Vineyards)
John T. Nickel (Nickel & Nickel)
Marvin Pestoni (Pestoni)
Jannine MacDonnell (Round Pond)
Peter McCrea (Stony Hill)
Ramiro Herrera (Caldwell)
Richard Partridge (Partridge)
Robert Buoncristiani (Buoncristiani)
William Casey (St. Clement)
William E. Jarvis (Jarvis)
Greetings from the ‘land of smiles’ where our life is centered around relaxing in a small village for three months, a much needed break from wine, and valuable time to rejuvenate and refresh for the upcoming year.
See you in spring 2026 for what will be the 20th year of the Napa Wine Project, when we will resume our intense work on this site. And we already have a lengthy list going of what needs to be done including who to visit with (both for new profiles and updating existing ones, including to see the major updates at Robert Mondavi Winery), wines to taste, places in and out of Napa Valley to see and vineyards to visit.
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