The Rutherford and Oakville AVAs - Early Days

 RICHARD MENDELSON | SEPTEMBER 13, 2016

In this excerpt from his book Appellation Napa Valley – Building and Protecting an American Treasure, Richard Mendelson shares his first-hand account of the early days in the creation of the Rutherford and Oakville AVAs and the many untold stories that took place during this important and formative period in Napa Valley’s history.

I love the wines of Rutherford Bench, from the heart of the valley, in part because they are among the classics that I drank with the Schoch family when I first arrived: the Cabernet Sauvignons of Inglenook, BV, Heitz Martha’s Vineyard, Mondavi’s To Kalon, and Freemark Abbey’s Bosché. These wines are made from grapes grown on well-drained, gravelly soils on the gentle, east-facing slopes of the Mayacamas Mountains and on the alluvial fans emanating from those mountains. They are balanced and elegant, with excellent weight, a finely chiseled texture, and full flavors. They also age gracefully.

In the words of longtime New York Times wine columnist Frank Prial, the Rutherford Bench “boasts one of the more exceptional concentrations of great wine producers in the world.” In his article entitled Wine; Napa’s Bench Marks, Prial wrote “Pauillac has Lafite-Rothschild, Mouton-Rothschild, Latour, Pichon Lalande and Lynch-Bages, to name a few; Vosne-Romanée has Romanée Conti, Romanée-Saint-Vivant, La Tâche and Richebourg; Châteauneuf du-Pape has Beaucastel, Rayas—but you get the point. These are towns or communes that produce very few, if any, common wines….

Among the wineries to be found in that rather small tract of real estate (Rutherford Bench) are Beaulieu, Inglenook, Niebaum-Coppola, Grgich Hills, Far Niente and Vichon; vineyard properties include the renowned Martha’s Vineyard and Bella Oaks Vineyard, whose grapes are used by Heitz Cellars, the Bosche Vineyard, which supplies Freemark Abbey, and parcels owned by the Robert Mondavi, Pine Ridge and Joseph Phelps wineries.”

André Tchelistcheff—or was it Maynard Amerine, no one knows for sure—coined the phrase “Rutherford dust” to describe the sensory quality of these Rutherford Bench wines. There are few references to what André actually meant by that term, but it appears to be those special qualities of cherries, plums, steeliness, fine-grained tannin, and a strong spine. Hugh Johnson, world-renowned British wine expert and author, refers to allspice as a common reference point for Rutherford Bench wines.

Johnson did more than just describe Rutherford Bench wines. He also defined the boundaries of the area in his widely read World Atlas of Wines. Johnson placed Rutherford Bench west of Highway 29, south of Grgich-Hills, and north of Dwyer Road. By contrast, other journalists and critics located Rutherford Bench as far south as Yountville and as far north as St. Helena. One thing was clear: Rutherford Bench was being informally defined by wine critics without the input of the people who actually live there or make the wines. Some of the local vintners and growers were bothered by the press definitions. They either disagreed with one or more of the boundaries, or they had a problem with the name—or both. Did the Bench extend from the Mayacamas Mountains to Highway 29, or did it continue to the Napa River? How could an area called Rutherford Bench be as far north as St. Helena and as far south as Yountville? Wouldn’t consumers be confused if the Rutherford name were used to describe parts of other townships?