Stereograph Wines was launched in 2003 and is a partnership between winemaker Sally Johnson Blum and her husband Max; that same year, they founded SJB Winemaking, a full-service winemaking firm providing winemaking services for a number of small brands both in Napa Valley and and outside of the valley. This is a cohesive partnership; Sally makes the wines and Max creates the labels and packaging.
Sally was born and raised in Michigan; Sally inherited her love of the outdoors, gardening and being project oriented from her parents. They were gardening enthusiasts farming a communal garden and later growing fruit trees and grapes on their own property. Her father produced both home-made grape and fruit wine.
She comes from a family of scientists; her mom is a biochemist and her father is a toxicologist while various aunts and uncles are engineers. Her family encouraged her to study science so she did, graduating from the University of Michigan with a degree in Biology, but also a second degree in French Literature. Besides her father’s home wine, her early introduction to wine was taking a study abroad trip as a freshman to France visiting a number of wineries and meeting vintners. After college she interned at Parke-Davis, the same company her mother worked for. But she soon realized she didn’t enjoy being in the lab all day and wanted to do something more creative.
So she enrolled in the viticulture program at UC Davis and then transitioned to enology. Her early interest was to pursue a career in farming but soon gravitated towards both the science and creative aspects of winemaking. She graduated with her Master’s in Winemaking from UC Davis in 1999 and then worked at St. Francis Winery for 8 years as an enologist. While at St. Francis she took 8 months off to work in the Barossa Valley in South Australia at Saint Hallett Winery. She realized she most enjoyed working for smaller wineries. She was winemaker for 15 years at Pride Mountain Vineyards, crediting Steve Pride as an early mentor.
After years of making wine for others, she wanted to produce her own wines, something that she felt inspired both from vineyard and variety, and to craft wines in addition to the obligatory Napa Valley Chardonnay and Cabernet Sauvignon. With Stereograph she has the latitude to explore, experiment and tap into her creative side.
Sometimes the most challenging parts of the wine industry are choosing a name for a wine brand. Max is an antiques dealer who is also passionate about Victorian photography. Stereograph refers to the first form of 3D photography where two photographs are merged; it is a pair of two nearly identical photographs, side by side, taken from slightly different angles to mimic the view from each eye. And Stereograph wines has accommodated this concept into their own tagline, “two perspectives, one vision”. The label reflects a Stereograph with the die cut between both parts of the label. Max designs the Stereograph labels.
The stereoscope (used to view stereographs) was invented in the UK by Sir Charles Wheatstone; he first described Stereopsis in 1838. Stereographs became very popular in the late 1800s and were a commercial success. The author Oliver Wendell Holmes invented a affordable stereo viewer for the U.S. Market. In the Atlantic Monthly dated 1859 he wrote, “Form is henceforth divorced from matter. In fact, matter as a visible object is of no great use any longer, except as the mould on which form is shaped. Give us a few negatives of a thing worth seeing, taken from different points of view, and that is all we want of it.”
The American Antiquarian Society in Worchester, MA (about a hour drive from Boston) houses one of the country’s largest collection of pre-1900 stereographs. Their collection of approximately 60,000 stereographs is available to the general public. Perhaps the largest stereograph collection in the country, the Keystone-Mast Collection is housed at the California Riverside/California Museum of Photography and contains approximately 350,000 items.
For another related early invention involving moving pictures, reference the zoetrope. Francis Ford Coppola houses a remarkable collection of zoetropes’ at his museum upstairs at Inglenook Winery.
American Antiquarian Society, Worchester MA
California Riverside/California Museum of Photography
Visit and photography coming by late 2025.
Select Wines
Whites
The inception of the inaugural Stereograph Chenin Blanc ocurred while driving with Josh Antsey, the owner of Henry’s Vineyard in the hills above Pope Valley. He pointed out what is probably the oldest Chenin Blanc in Napa Valley growing in his vineyard, originally planted in 1947. The year of planting caught Sally’s attention as that is her mother’s birth year. But so to did the variety. She asked him if he had any grapes for sale that year, but unfortunately they were all spoken for by other small producers. She didn’t take no for an answer and later conveyed her strong interest in producing wines from these grapes. He relented and peeled off a ton of fruit.
Sally had never worked with Chenin Blanc before so she queried those who had. Her original idea was to ferment and age it in a concrete vessel, but due to timing she wasn’t able to secure one of these. So she became creative and discovered Clayver S.r.l., a heat fired manufacturer of ceramic vessels specifically for the wine industry based in Vado Ligure (near Genoa) in northern Italy. This vessel is slightly porous with less deep crevasses as compared to that of an amphorae vessel.
With her white wines in particular, she is always extremely careful on oxygen exposure in the cellar; after fermentation was complete, she racked the wine under gas to twice filled Gauthier oak barrels for the remainder of its aging (4 months). The wine went through 65% malolactic fermentation. For all her whites, she presses slow and gentle, trying to capture flavor without overly capturing phenolics. And this shows in her white wines – with texture always an important and complementary characteristic.
The 2024 Stereograph Chenin Blanc Napa Valley is 100% varietal; this wine is medium straw in color. The minerally and diversely layered bouquet offers an initial aromatic of chalk followed by lemon meringue, honeycomb, star jasmine, pineapple, Golden delicious apple and orchard fruits including apricot, yellow peach, and white nectarine. As it evolves in the glass, it citrus character becomes more dominate with scents of grapefruit, lemon zest and lime. One can immediately feel the lovely grip of tension which runs the length of the palate, a weighted tug if you will which is saddled nicely between intensity of flavor and its zippy acidity, which delivers plenty of ‘movement’. This wine tastes like golden delicious apple, pear, golden kiwi, apricot, nectarine, pineapple and a light herbal character that lingers on the finish. Not green, not grassy, not aqueous and not austere. This is a Chenin with plenty of character and texture; we love that. The grapes were harvested at 3.02 pH with the final pH clocking in at 3.37. This wine is ready to drink now but can certainly be aged for several more years. Only 45 cases of this beauty were produced.
Reds
The 2023 Stereograph X2 Red Blend is 60% Merlot from Blackbird Vineyard in the Oak Knoll District and 35% Cabernet Sauvignon from Volker Eisele Vineyard in Chiles Valley. This wine is deep ruby and opaque; immediately captivating, the bouquet is floral with scents of violets, lilacs and lavender with additional aromas of chalk/blackboard, dried sage, dark plum, blackberry and boysenberry. It is fresh, lively and superbly balanced for such a youthful bottling. For reference we tasted this less than 2 years post vintage. The palate is more darker fruited than red with flavors of plum, blackberry, dark raspberry and cherry. The tannins sport a silky and fully polished texture; there is nothing edgy about their feel. Their integration on the finish is seamless, like a gentle kiss from a loved one. Part the textural appeal of this wine is a result of the vintage, but also resulting from it’s cold soak and extended maceration, a fining effect of leaving the skins in the wine post fermentation. 10 cases of this wine were donated to the Napa Valley Wine Auction in 2025.
The 2023 Stereograph Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon is 88% Cabernet Sauvignon, 10% Merlot and 2% Cabernet Franc. This wine is deep ruby and opaque; ripe and forward fruited, its aromas are more dark than red fruited. These include blackberry, boysenberry, mulberry, cherry and plum with an underlying floral character including violets and lavender. Additional layers include expresso, mocha, coffee grinds, dark chocolate, pipe tobacco and old cedar box. The entry offers a sweetness of ripe fruit including blackberry, cherry, dark plum and boysenberry with a lasting note of dark cocoa powder and chocolate. Fully coating the palate are lightly grainy, gravelly and chalky textured tannins. Their presence parallels the fruit in tandem on the extended finish.
The 2023 Sterograph Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon is 100% varietal from Renteria 360 Vineyard, Vangone Vineyard Block D and Oakville East. This wine is deep ruby and nearly opaque. The bouquet smells comforting like cozying up to a warm fire in a mountain cabin in the winter with a glass of hot chocolate. It is a union of primary darker fruit scents and secondary barrel influences. These aromas include Satsuma plum, dark cherry, blackberry pie, and boysenberry jam accompanied by mocha, cocoa powder, Graham cracker and dark chocolate. Fully ripe, the palate mimics the bouquet to some extent in terms of both fruit flavor and barrel influences. This wine tastes like dark cherry at the peak of its ripeness, blackberry, cassis, boysenberry and chocolate. Plush and polished, the mouth feel at less than two years post vintage, already features rounded and pillowy textured tannins which linger with a light dryness. This wine is going to be a crowd favorite
The 2024 Stereograph Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon is from the UC Davis owned South Station Vineyard (barrel sample). This wine is deep ruby and opaque with an amaranthine rim; elegant with both red and darker fruits, its scents include cherry, Santa Rosa plum, dark raspberry, perhaps a light layer of chalk and some floral underpinnings including lilacs and lavender. And as it evolves further, it expresses a note of suede. Fresh, and superbly balanced, the palate tastes like dark plums, blackberry, boysenberry, Pakistani mulberry and a lingering note of cocoa powder. Soft is a great adjective to describe this wine’s texture at this early stage. The tannins are like perfectly rounded spheres, lingering with a subtle chalky character that fully coats the palate. They persist softly in tandem with the fruit. While extremely young, this wine already shows well with the oak a complementary character. 14.6% alcohol. A balanced an elegant character is the result of aging in Cavain barrels; additional barrels are from Taransaud and Darnajou. This wine is being aged in 60% new French oak.
Sally crafts the Stereograph red wines with texture in mind; they are never edgy, even in their youth. The wines are built to deliver pleasure at any age, but have all the characteristics to also be highly age worthy.
Stereograph’s inaugural release was 350 cases with their sophomore year jumping up to 600 cases. The focus of sales is on both on-premise and off-premise placements heavily weighted in the direction of DTC with the balance being California and another state or two via distribution. For more information, to join their mailing list or to purchase wines, please visit: www.stereographwines.com
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