Brand story
Dominus Napa Valley
Dominus comes from a single vineyard with an unusual claim on Napa Valley's history. Napanook lies in a natural amphitheatre at the foot of the Mayacamas Mountains on the valley's west side, near Yountville, where George Yount planted some of the very first vines in Napa in 1838. Fed by winter rains, underground springs run through ancient riverbeds beneath the site, supplying water that lets the vines root deeply — the basis for the estate's commitment to dry farming. Christian Moueix, who had taken charge of his family's Pomerol châteaux including Pétrus in 1970, first saw Napanook in 1981 and sensed immediately that it could make a wine of unparalleled quality; he began producing Dominus here in 1983. In 1997 he commissioned Herzog & de Meuron to build the winery — their first project outside Europe, and the first building anywhere made with gabions, wire cages of local basalt that insulate the cellar and let the structure dissolve into the landscape.
The vineyard covers 134 acres, 102 of them planted, on gravelly clay loam with a gentle 3–10% slope that drains naturally, farmed organically and dry-farmed, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The winemaking is deliberately minimalist, on the conviction that a wine's character is decided by the grapes at harvest: hand cluster sorting, optical berry sorting, gentle pump-overs, and hand-racking barrel to barrel every three months by the traditional esquive method. All of it comes from Napanook alone — a genuinely estate-bottled Napa wine, which is rarer than it sounds. The result is tightly woven and complex, with dark plum and chocolate, a polished, mineral frame drawn from the benchland stone, and the structure to age for decades. Bordeaux discipline applied, without compromise, to one Californian hillside.
