Napa Winery Project finally opens its doors

An interesting new upscale winery opens in Calistoga in northern Napa Valley: it’s a working winery with a well-respected winemaker on the same land as a brand new luxury hotel.

The Four Seasons hotel is not yet open, but the winery, called Elusa, is. Not only that, the winery has already made vintages of wine dating back to 2012, when the project was first proposed.

The winemaker is Thomas Rivers Brown, a man who is highly regarded with the most expensive buyers every year. Napa Valley wines at Premiere Napa Valley. Brown gives instant credibility to any cellar project.

“It’s a working cellar with 18 fermenters. There is a barrel room,” Brown told Wine-Searcher. “So many of these things have a cheesy quality. But that will be the real thing. If you’re a guest there, you’ll be welcome to go down to the crushpad and check out. You have 200 guest beds on the property every day. . Most wineries would kill for that. “

For Napa Taxi lovers, to learn that Brown has been quietly working on this project for nine years and already has library wines for sale is great news.

“We started in 2012, and since 2014 we have been buying fruit from the best vineyards in CalistogaBrown told Wine-Searcher. “Wineries need a story. We don’t just want to have wines from all over the place, pinots from the Sonoma Coast or the Willamette Valley or whatever. We are very happy to explore the AVA Calistoga which is still a little underserved. The focus will be on Calistoga. What does Calistoga do best? There are many old vines of Zinfandel and Little Sirah and Charcoal here.”

Don’t worry, Elusa is going to be making a lot of Cabernet Sauvignon. Elusa owns an estate vineyard, and beyond that, Brown has lined up vineyard sources in different parts of the appellation. For fruits on the hillside, he looks nearby Diamond Mountain.

But he is also fascinated by vineyards like that of Vince Tofanelli, from which he draws dry-matured vines, pruned in the head. Sauvignon Blanc.

“I’ve known Vince since I moved to Napa Valley,” said Brown, who came to the valley in 1996 from his native South Carolina. “He has a block planted in the 1930s and a block planted in the 1950s. He would rather be hit by a truck than take out that Zinfandel. They are an old school Italian family and they are not all going to crash. the cabernets and they’re not going to irrigate. “

A light touch

This style matches Brown’s winemaking style, which is so minimalist that he says it worries some customers. That didn’t narrow his list, however: Brown currently makes or consults wine for 40 different wineries, including Schrader Cellars, Round Pond Estate, Pulido-Walker and Revana. He also has his own Calistoga winery, Rivers-Marie, with his wife Geneviève Marie Welsh.

“Sometimes it confuses customers,” Brown said. “We tell them the story of wine making and it’s the most boring news you can imagine. They wonder why they pay us.”

And it’s not a small salary. In 2018, Wine Spectator reported that he was making $ 700,000 a year from Schrader alone; a new customer started at $ 20,000 per year but grew to $ 150,000 as the wines arrived and started to gain attention.

“It’s as little intervention as possible in the cellar and maximum effort in the vineyard,” said Brown. “I think you get more site signing if you don’t touch the wine. We just don’t do anything we don’t have to do. It’s kind of shocking to people.”

Brown’s winemaking philosophy is generally to let the site do the talking, but he takes care to manage the tannins in the vines as he likes to make wines that are nice on the way out. He also likes “intellectually interesting” wines, both to make and to drink. Although he is best known for Cabernet, at home he enjoys drinking Pinot Noir, Nebbiolo, Grenache and white wines, and he prefers wines with a moderate alcohol content.

“I’m not the one to drink a drink a night. I’m more of the type to drink a bottle a night,” Brown said.

It has high standards for its finished products, which is why it emptied the entire 2020 vintage of its own Rivers-Marie wine.

“We brought a lot of fruit and we evaluated it and we determined it was contaminated with the smoke and we got rid of it all,” Brown said. “If it’s smoky, it’s faulty and you can’t bottle it. With Rivers-Marie, we probably lost $ 5 million in revenue throwing all that fruit away, but it was important to the reputation. of the brand. But I think we’d see half the valley close if we lost two consecutive vintages like this. “

Visitors to the new Elusa Winery, or the Four Seasons and its restaurant and bar, might have a good chance of seeing Brown, even in harvest season.

“I think I’ll be there often. The resort is only about two miles from my house,” said Brown. “I am happy to exchange a residence for access to the gym and pool. I told them I wanted a permanent seat at the bar. I am so happy this place is open. Calistoga is in urgent need. from another upscale restaurant. I just think the overall friendliness of the whole experience is excellent for Calistoga. “