Vertical Tasting of Phelps Insignia

In 1973, Joseph Phelps, who was then running one of the largest construction companies in the U.S., bought a 600-acre cattle ranch outside St. Helena and finished building a winery on the property in time for the 1974 harvest, when he launched his now-iconic Insignia bottling. Insignia was essentially the winery’s "reserve" but Phelps didn’t like that word, hence the Insignia name for what was the first proprietary Bordeaux-style blend in Napa Valley.

From the start, Insignia was made from the best blocks in the best vineyards at Phelps’s disposal: until 2004, this included a percentage of purchased fruit. But his long-term goal from the start had been to make Insignia from 100% estate fruit and to that end Phelps purchased several prime vineyard blocks over the years located around the Napa Valley. Even though fruit suppliers for Insignia evolved through the years and Phelps’s own vineyards came on line over time, there has been a notable consistency to the core of the wine. 

Joseph Phelps Vineyards’ Home Ranch in the Spring

The Keys to Quality and Longevity

Insignia is adamantly not a single-site wine. The quality of the raw materials, the continuity in winemaking, and the winemaking team’s ability to cherry-pick and blend its best fruit are the elements that have enabled remarkable consistency of quality and style—not to mention ageability—as my vertical tasting at the winery in mid-March made clear. 

Phelps’s first winemaker Walter Schug was responsible for the vintages here through 1982. Some of his earliest Insignia releases have become California legends. Following Schug’s years, Craig Williams was then in charge of winemaking for a quarter-century, first as winemaker and then as director of winemaking, through the spring of 2008. After Sarah Gott, who began working at Joseph Phelps in 1992, made the 2001 vintage under Williams’s direction, Damian Parker, who had been at the winery in a variety of positions since 1981, vinified in 2002 through 2007, with enologist Ashley Hepworth serving as associate winemaker. Hepworth took over responsibility for winemaking in 2008. In short, Insignia’s consistency of style has been largely a function of continuity in winemaking.