Maya Dalla Valle landed a coveted gig in January: head winemaker at one of Napa Valley’s most highly regarded wineries. Granted, it’s her family’s winery, Dalla Valle Vineyards, and her first name is emblazoned on the flagship cuvee. The job, presumably, was hers for the taking — though her mother, as if to avoid any appearance of nepotism, is quick to note her daughter’s objectively impressive qualifications, including two master’s degrees and stints at famous European wineries like Ornellaia, Petrus and Latour. Nonetheless, the 33-year-old’s appointment marks a significant new era for Dalla Valle, and maybe also for a larger segment of luxury Napa Valley wine.
Dalla Valle is widely considered one of Napa’s so-called “cult” Cabernet producers, a label applied to an exclusive set of wineries that are as well known for their powerful reds as for their prodigious prices. Along with estates like Screaming Eagle, Harlan, Colgin and Bryant, Dalla Valle came to prominence in the early 1990s, thanks in large part to a then-rare 100-point score from the wine critic Robert Parker, and helped define an entire era of luxury wine. With their limited-production bottlings, auras of exclusivity and rich, ripe Cabernets, the cult wineries elevated Napa Valley’s status: Suddenly, Bordeaux wasn’t the only wine worth collecting.
But times are changing. It’s no longer a given that a winery like Dalla Valle, whose wines sell for between $100 and $425 per bottle, will have a captive audience forever. Millennials are not drinking wine at the same rates that their parents did at their age, and those who do may gravitate to natural wine or esoteric grape varieties instead of blue-chip Napa Cab. Today’s wine consumer wants to be able to visit the estate whose wines they collect, but Dalla Valle’s zoning permit prohibits them from hosting visitors for tastings.
Recent developments reflect the fact that the cult wineries are in a state of flux. Several of them have sold to new owners. One was embroiled in a bitter lawsuit with an ex-employee who alleged the winery was in financial trouble. Another has recently been battling with neighbors over a proposal to expand its tasting-room capacity. Dalla Valle has largely stayed out of the news, which is just how Maya and her mother, Naoko, would prefer to keep it. But the existential question is as urgent for them as any of their peers: how to bring their famous name into a new era, evolving enough to stay fresh but not so much that they alienate their longtime following.
“We did well for a long time being mysterious, but there’s so many other really good wines out there now,” says Maya. “Now, if you’re mysterious, people will just forget about you. We have to consistently be thinking — how do we stay relevant?”
Meanwhile, the luxury Napa wine market has become much more competitive. If Dalla Valle was once part of a small group of wineries operating in a certain price tier, it’s now in a much larger group; Dozens of Napa producers sell wines for $200 or more. Can the market sustain them all? Maybe not forever. Maya acknowledges that “there’s going to be a self-correcting period.” It’s now her job to ensure that Dalla Valle Vineyards survives it.
Until Maya joined the family business, Naoko had been running Dalla Valle largely by herself for 25 years.
A native of Kobe, Japan, Naoko was living in Tokyo in the late ’70s and early ’80s when she met Gustav Dalla Valle, an imposing, boisterous Italian who had founded the diving-equipment empire Scubapro. He and Naoko married in 1981, shortly after he’d sold Scubapro, and the two moved tothe Caribbean island of Mustique, where a newly retired Gustav could go diving every day.
Life in Mustique was luxurious — they had a butler, a cook, a maid, a gardener — but soon they started splitting their time with Napa Valley. Some friends wanted to open a resort and spa in California, and Gustav and Naoko were supposed to scout possible locations.
That they would start a winery in Napa was not immediately obvious. Gustav, according to Naoko, thrust himself into this new wine-centric community with characteristic zeal anyway. They bought a house in the eastern hillsides above Oakville that had a small Zinfandel vineyard. Gustav was thrilled. “He was like a little kid,” Naoko says. “He wanted to give the fruit away.” The hotel project never materialized.
Doug Shafer, whose Shafer Vineyards is about 4 miles south of the Dalla Valle property, remembers when he began seeing this tall Italian newcomer around town in the mid-’80s. “This guy was a presence,“ Shafer says. “Visually, he was just dashing, with this long, silver hair swept back. His eyes were just dancing, sparkling, inquisitive.”
Within a few years, the word was out about this dashing Italian man’s vineyard. In 1986, Gustav and Naoko finished construction on a winery next to their home. They grafted Cabernet Sauvignon onto the Zinfandel vines. They planted a new parcel with Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc grapes, naming it after their daughter — Maya’s Vineyard. They charged what seemed like astronomical prices for the time: $25 for the Dalla Valle Cabernet, and $45 for the Maya’s Vineyard Cabernet.
For an unproven winery, that pricing scheme was risky. Gustav, though, had a go-big-or-go-home mentality, Naoko says. “Scubapro was like the Rolls-Royce of scuba equipment,” she says. “We had this idea — if we were going to make wine, it was going to be the same.”
The site, with its bright-red, basalt-rich, volcanic soils, was bound to produce distinctive wines. But the wines were equally shaped by the choices that the Dalla Valles and their staff, in particular the winemaker Heidi Barrett, made in those early years.
Maya Dalla Valle (left) and her mother, winery proprietor Naoko Dalla Valle, in the blending room at their winery.
Photos by Alvin A.H. Jornada/Special to The ChronicleAlthough Napa Valley’s destiny was already tied to the Cabernet Sauvignon grape, by the late 1980s many winemakers were realizing that it needed a blending partner if the valley’s wines were to compete with the multi-grape blends common in Bordeaux. Most people’s bet was on Merlot. The Dalla Valles instead bet on the subtle, delicate, floral Cabernet Franc.
“Cab Franc ended up being a winning hand, whereas Merlot didn’t as much,” Jim Laube, the longtime Wine Spectator critic, says. “It added a different type of aromatic profile. If Cab Sauv is the bass player, Franc would be the string.”
The winery was on the ascent, and in late 1995, Parker awarded a perfect 100 points to the 1992 Maya — a star-making turn in those days. It was bittersweet: Gustav had battled cancer for eight years, and his health was in decline. Aware of his illness, Parker faxed over his review of the wine before it was published so that Gustav could see it. He died a month later.
At this point, with Gustav gone and an 8-year-old to raise, it might have looked to an outsider like Naoko was bound to sell the estate. She insists that she never wanted to. “I’d come to love this winemaking life,” she says. And she’d come to feel that maintaining the winery was the best way of honoring her husband’s memory.
Besides, business was looking up. After the 100-point score, the wines became an overnight sensation. The phones and faxes buzzed with orders; Naoko quickly ran out of inventory. “People were offering to trade us cars,” Naoko says, in exchange for her wine.
Meanwhile, Naoko had a major problem on her hands: The vineyard was dying. Due to some bad advice from a vineyard consultant, some vines had been improperly grafted, resulting in a phenomenon known as scion rooting in which the top part of the vine takes root in the soil, rendering the rootstock ineffective. The fatal grape louse phylloxera was slowly overtaking the plants.
In those early months following Gustav’s death, Naoko made some bold executive decisions. She fired Barrett, who was widely considered responsible for elevating Dalla Valle to its sterling reputation. Barrett had taken on a large roster of other winery clients; Naoko told Wine Spectator that Barrett “is a very good winemaker ... but she is busy.” Barrett described it as “a shock.” In Barrett’s place, she hired Mia Klein and Tony Soter, two winemakers who were already locally famous.
By 1997, Naoko began planning a costly replanting of the entire vineyard, a decision that meant financial sacrifice but would ultimately be crucial to the business’ long-term success. It would take a decade before the site was completely replanted and bearing enough fruit to make consistent volumes of wine. There were years in there where they were able to make only a few hundred cases (compared to their typical output of 3,000); in 2004, Maya’s Vineyard yielded nothing.
Naoko stayed the course. “She was a quiet force,” says Shafer. “She was strong, kept a steady hand.” While he was alive, Gustav had been the face of the winery — the flashy, gregarious, thunderous personality. The calmer, gentler Naoko turned out to be just as powerful, maybe even more powerful, of a guiding force for the winery. Dalla Valle’s reputation for consistently beautiful wines did not falter.
Growing up, Maya never wanted to become a winemaker. She felt what many kids from small towns feel: wanting to get out. “I wanted to do my own exploring and not spend my entire life here,” she says. She studied international relations in college, hoping to work for a nongovernmental organization overseas. But as she entered adulthood, two things changed her mind. First, she found she loved “science, growing things and working with my hands,” she says, a discovery made while working the harvest season at Neyers Vineyards in Napa after she graduated in 2009.
Second, it became clear to her that the trajectory of any family-owned wine estate can really go only one of two ways: The kids can take over, or the family can sell. And in the years after Maya graduated from college, more and more were selling.
Naoko never pressured her to become a winemaker, Maya says. “She would have been happy to continue running the vineyards as long as she could and then sell it. But when I thought about that, I just couldn’t come to terms with the idea of this becoming part of a larger group of wineries.”
That feeling intensified when Maya worked and attended school in Europe, where many wineries have remained within a family for hundreds of years. She came to see that sort of continuity as “crucial in terms of maintaining integrity” not just for the individual wineries, but for entire regions. If all of Napa Valley were taken over by corporations, would its wines lose some of their prestige?
Most children who take over their parents’ wineries end up on the business side; it’s less common to see someone doing the day-to-day cellar work, which can be physically grueling, involving long days of manual labor. Naoko still has a penchant for keeping famous winemaking consultants on the payroll — Andy Erickson, a former winemaker at Screaming Eagle, and Michel Rolland, who advises more than 150 wineries around the world. Yet on any given day, Maya is the one driving the tractor through the vines, often trailed by her two Corgis. Though she’ll have to handle the business side of things eventually, when she takes over from her mother, she’s always been primarily drawn to the hands-on side.
The new Dalla Valle in charge has not been shy about introducing changes — sometimes to Naoko’s chagrin. On Maya’s watch, the winery has adopted some practices that feel more aligned with trendy young winemakers than with the luxury-wine establishment.
Maya now ferments the wines with native yeasts, rather than inoculating them with cultured strains, which are viewed as more predictable. She is aging some of her wines in clay amphora, which she believes can imbue the wines with “a mineral purity,” she says, rather than the traditional oak barrels. To her, these are part of the constant work of trying to elevate the quality of the wines, a never-ending R&D process. But, if only incidentally, her changes may have the added effect of making Dalla Valle feel more current to a new generation of wine consumers who are attracted to a sense of experimentation.
Most significant, Maya has converted the estate to biodynamic farming, a regimen that goes a few steps beyond organic and is far from standard practice among Napa’s elite wineries. It’s a move that shows her identification with a younger generation of climate- and sustainability-focused vintners. Instead of using synthetic fungicides to ward off fungal issues in the vines, a biodynamic philosophy might call for the application of a tea made from the the horsetail plant, which has been used as a homeopathic remedy for kidney problems since ancient times. It’s typically more expensive to farm biodynamically, and to the uninitiated looks a little risky (what if the horsetail tea doesn’t work?). Maya says she’s already seen meaningful improvements.
In hot years, for example, the grapes will often get sunburned, showing little brown freckles on the skins and potentially diminishing the quality of the resulting wine. But under the biodynamic regimen, Maya has started applying a stinging-nettle tonic to the grapes when a heat spike begins. It seems to have eliminated the sunburn issues and allows her to avoid spraying a synthetic-chemical treatment.
In contrast with winemakers at some other exclusive estates, who closely guard their trade secrets, Maya has developed a reputation within her community for openness. “She’s not afraid to talk about the challenges she’s dealt with where other people might not be open to revealing them,” says her peer Meghan Zobeck, winemaker at Burgess Cellars. When Zobeck came to Maya with questions about using amphora, Maya was honest about some of her misgivings. “She’s a natural skeptic,” Zobeck says. (Ultimately, though, Zobeck was taken enough by Maya’s amphora-aged Cabernet Franc that she bought a vessel herself.)
That guileless openness may be an inheritance from Gustav, but Maya also exhibits her mother’s sense of restraint. Recently, she quietly formed a partnership with Ornellaia, the ultra-prestigious Tuscan winery where she was once a harvest intern. Together, she and Ornellaia winemaker Axel Heinz have produced a Napa Valley wine called DVO. Going into business with Ornellaia is a big deal, yet Maya treats the development with characteristic understatement. “She doesn’t do a ton of self-promotion of any kind, and then suddenly you hear Maya has formed a partnership with Ornellaia,” Zobeck says. “She’s just doing things without a lot of pomp and circumstance.”
None of Maya’s changes yet represent a reinvention of the wheel, and the pillars of the business model remain, such as the requirement that Dalla Valle mailing-list members buy three bottles of wine per year or else they lose their spot. But to her credit, Maya appears sanguine about the challenges that remain ahead, including climate change. Unlike many of her peers, who fear a public-relations backlash about smoke-tainted wines, she talks candidly about the possibility that her 2020 wines may have been impacted by wildfire smoke. (To my palate, they tasted clean.)
With Maya just six months into her new role, it’s too soon to know whether the changes she’s implementing now will prove too edgy for Dalla Valle’s longtime customer base. So far, her decisions seem to have been canny. Though scores fueled Dalla Valle’s fame in the beginning, the new protocols like biodynamic farming and amphora aging seem designed to reach a different sort of audience than the traditional critics. Today a 100-point Cabernet is not hard to find, with critics doling out perfect scores much more frequently than they did in the early 1990s, and high scores no longer drive sales as powerfully. To build a successful high-end wine business today is a much more nebulous, fragmented enterprise, requiring an appeal to people on many different platforms rather than through a small handful of individual raters. How exactly to pull that off is a question that neither Maya nor the California wine industry at large has figured out yet. Still, Maya’s choices so far show that she knows Dalla Valle won’t remain relevant by staying the same forever.
She muses freely about what the future might hold. Despite the fact that Dalla Valle has never made white wines, Maya wants to plant Carricante at the property, an obscure white grape variety from Sicily. And her next mission, she says, is to bring sheep, llamas and chickens into the vineyard, to provide grazing for the cover crop and natural fertilization. And ...
Her mother finally interjects. “OK, Maya!” she exclaims. “That’s enough changes.”
Esther Mobley is The San Francisco Chronicle’s wine critic. Email: emobley@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @Esther_mobley
June 12, 2021 at 06:03PM
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