It just came to my attention a great article in Wine Spectator Magazine about legendary winemaker Robert Foley. With the fabulous 2006 Robert Foley Wines Pepperland Petite Syrah now available @ $88.95 in 12 bottle cases, as well as the recently released 2006 Pride Mountain Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon @ $95.00 in a 12 bottle case, I thought I'd bring it to everyone's attention.
Bob Foley's Magic Touch
From Wine Spectator magazine, November 15, 2005 issue
Barrel by barrel, Bob Foley uses a wine thief to siphon samples of his new wines from the 2003 and 2004 vintages, the first he's made at his new, rented winery on Howell Mountain. They display uncommon traits. Uncommon for most California wines, that is. Not Foley's.
Uniformly inky dark and saturated in color, his hearty reds offer profound richness, polished textures and dense, concentrated flavors that coat the palate. They are hedonistic treasures that reflect the style Foley has refined over a quarter-century of winemaking in Napa Valley.
"Pretty good, huh?" he asks rhetorically, knowing that the wine is awesome, a classic Foley rendition that serves up layers of plush, complex flavors. "I am so happy with these wines," he says, displaying the boyish enthusiasm of a man who has just made his first great wine.
Yet Foley already has a cellar full of stunning wines to his credit, running the gamut from Napa's most famous wine, Cabernet Sauvignon, to wines from the lowly Charbono grape. He is also enamored with Syrah and its underappreciated cousin Petite Sirah.
Foley is best known for his work at Pride Mountain Vineyard, nestled along the crest of Napa Valley's Spring Mountain appellation, west of St. Helena. He has also made wine under his own Robert Foley label (no relation to Foley Estate in Santa Barbara) for several years, featuring a Cabernet blend he calls Claret, a terrific Charbono and a gutsy Petite Sirah. But his influence now extends to a group of emerging wines in Napa Valley that are accumulating high ratings.
In the early 1990s, Foley was instrumental in developing Paloma Vineyard, a neighbor of Pride's on Spring Mountain. "He taught us everything we know," says Barbara Richards, who owns Paloma along with her winemaker husband, Jim. In 2003, the Paloma Merlot 2001 was named Wine Spectator's Wine of the Year.
To put Foley's success in perspective, since the early 1990s, when the first Pride wines were released, Wine Spectator has reviewed 100 Foley-made wines, and an astonishing 75 have earned outstanding scores of 90 points or higher.
That puts him in the elite company of such renowned winemakers as Helen Turley. She is one of the most influential California winemakers of the past 20 years through her work at wineries such as her own Marcassin (specializing in Chardonnay and Pinot Noir), Bryant Family Vineyard and Peter Michael.
Foley has had the same impact with Pride and Paloma and his own brand, and his initial wines for Switchback Ridge and Hourglass, two vineyard-driven labels, show great promise.
The Peterson family, which owns Switchback Ridge, northeast of St. Helena, has owned its land since 1900, but only began farming wine grapes 15 years ago. Once Foley saw the quality of their vines, he agreed to make their wines, all of which have been fascinating.
The Smith family owns Hourglass, a 4-acre Cabernet vineyard on Lodi Lane, also north of St. Helena. They too approached Foley about making their wines, which are perhaps Foley's most elegant to date, showing that his repertoire is not limited to dense and opulent bottlings.
Foley also deserves credit for rejuvenating the School House label. It was one of the early pioneers of Spring Mountain Pinot Noir, with clones said to be from Burgundy's famous Domaine de la Romanée-Conti vineyard. After years of nonproduction, the label and vineyard were revived, with new Pinot Noirs appearing in the mid-1990s. The 2001 School House (88, $75) is elegant and stylish, a more restrained version of Pinot Noir amid the current trend of riper, richer bottlings.
Foley is also working on two new projects. One is a Cabernet called Engle, named after owner Ron Engle, who intends to use the wine to raise funds for recreational and athletic activities at St. Helena schools. Foley is also planning to make wine with David Abreu, an old friend and one of Napa's viticultural gurus, who owns a vineyard on Howell Mountain.
Foley has been around wine since childhood. His parents cultivated Cabernet and Merlot (then an obscure grape in California), and operated a small winery in the backyard of their home in San Ramon Valley, in Contra Costa County east of San Francisco.
"It was more than a hobby," Foley says of his parents' homemade wine. His father took winemaking seriously, reading books and enrolling in courses at the University of California, Davis. He even went to the trouble (and expense) of buying French oak barrels—and this was in 1964, long before French oak became as popular at California wineries as it is today.
Growing up with wine and working summer jobs in Napa Valley further piqued Foley's interest. In 1968 he tasted a barrel sample of the Inglenook Charbono. "That affected me deeply," he recalls. "That rocked my world. Right then I wanted to make something that good."
Foley decided he'd try his hand at enology and went on to attend the UC, Davis, the state's top winemaking school. "I was astounded that you could major in winemaking," he says. At Davis, he learned the language of chemistry, essential to understanding the basics of winemaking.
One summer before graduation, Foley worked for Joe Heitz, the feisty owner of Heitz Cellar, further fueling his interest in Napa wines, Cabernet Sauvignon in particular.
After graduation, Foley went to work for Markham, a newly opened winery in St. Helena, where he made his first Merlot. Two were vintage blends—1976-1977 and 1978-1979—made under Markham's Vinmark label.
In 1980, Markham bought Merlot grapes from Nathan Fay's vineyard in the Stags Leap District. That wine, a far superior effort, was bottled under the Markham label. It was a big hit.
Markham had discovered that Merlot, typically softer and fleshier than Cabernet, had cachet. Foley enjoyed the challenge of working with Merlot. For the next decade, through 1991, Foley directed winemaking at Markham, an era in which he made consistently excellent Cabernet, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Petite Sirah.
In the back of his mind, though, Foley could remember the gauntlet thrown down by his mentor Heitz: "Bob, you're full of crazy ideas—like bottling Merlot as a varietal wine," Foley recalls Heitz telling him in a teasing way. "It's just a blending grape."
But that characterization doesn't apply to the rich, flamboyant, densely flavored Merlots Foley makes. Under the Pride, Paloma and Switchback Ridge labels, for instance, Foley's Merlots have been enormously concentrated, the kind of ripe, expressive wines that so many California wine drinkers prize. Foley's affinity for the grape led to a remarkable mastery.
In some Napa circles, Foley's success with the underdog grape earned him the title of Mr. Merlot. Some might consider that a snide compliment given the grape's reputation for mediocrity. As Merlot's popularity grew, it was overplanted and mass-produced, often making bland, innocuous wines.
Talking wine with Foley, one is struck by his supreme confidence and ability to articulate what he hopes to achieve with his wines. He's not cocky, just self-assured. That confidence began to blossom after leaving Markham. His career shifted gears in 1991 when Jim and Barbara Pride hired him as winemaker for their new vineyard and winery after the harvest.
The Prides had acquired a planted vineyard in 1989, which they later expanded, and sold their grapes elsewhere. But they decided in 1991 to make wine, and that required Foley to create blends from Pride's wine, which had been made at Rombauer winery and was already aging in barrel.
Working backward from the barrel, Foley says he tried to conceptualize what Pride might do with the three key Bordeaux grapes—Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Merlot. One huge plus, he says, is that Pride bought Paloma's Merlot, and that gave the Pride Merlot an added measure of complexity. Eventually, all three of the varietals were made separately (usually with small portions of the other grapes), along with a Reserve bottling that utilized all three grapes.
"I thought that if [the Richards] did diligent farming [at Paloma], they could grow the best Merlot on the planet," Foley explains. In 1994, Paloma started making its first wines, with Foley coaching Jim Richards on winemaking. Eventually, as Paloma used more of its own grapes, Pride relied more on its own vineyards.
Ironically, Foley explains, the Prides hadn't thought much about Merlot as a wine because of Cabernet's popularity and Merlot's status as an unknown. But they agreed to give the grape a try. Foley's Pride Merlots were hugely successful.
Working with the grapes at Pride and Paloma also influenced Foley's concept of winemaking. "Before I started working with Pride ranch, my job had mainly been as a winemaker," he says. "My main input started once we started crushing grapes.
"But I realized how irregularly the vineyard and grapes ripened on the hillsides. I had to work with the vineyard guys, to balance the vineyard."
That meant spending more time among the vines throughout the year, from pruning during the winter months to leaf-pulling and green harvesting. The decision as to when to pick comes down to tasting the grapes—Foley harvests at optimum ripeness.
Once he began to appreciate the importance of ripening patterns, Foley focused on harvesting individual blocks of grapes at their peak of flavor. Foley says he doesn't think about a winemaking style per se. "That's something someone else describes when analyzing the wine," he says. What he does try to do is maximize the vineyard's potential.
While Foley's wines typically display exotic spice and oak flavors, he sees those characteristics as seasoning elements. For example, after his wines are fermented, he puts them into neutral barrels. "That way I can evaluate the wine, understand the structure and understand the vineyard," he says. Once he's studied the wines, they go into mostly new oak barrels for a year to 15 months.
The goal for all the wines is straightforward. "I want them to be enjoyable when they're young and hopefully they can age very well. But vintages vary. There are vintages that start out with a lot of pizzazz and then fizzle out. Others start out slowly and develop into a swan."
Proof of that evolution came earlier this year in Wine Spectator's 1995 Cabernet retrospective. The top-rated wine in my recent blind tasting of more than 50 of the vintage's top Cabernets was the Pride Reserve (97 points), a truly phenomenal wine brimming with rich layers of flavor. (For more on this retrospective see Collecting, page 208, and the Buying Guide, page 254.)
Foley takes the success in stride. "I love what I'm doing, even when it gets a little crazy," he says. The old abandoned winery on Howell Mountain he and his wife cleaned up is cutting into his time at Pride, which itself is going through a transition following the death last year of owner Jim Pride. That was when Foley decided to look for a winery of his own.
The property is called Candlestick Ridge and it has a small vineyard planted to Bordeaux and Rhône varieties that overlooks Pope Valley to the northeast. It's an off-the-beaten-path location that suits the side of Foley that likes to live on the fringe.
One can hardly wait to see what's next in line for this gifted winemaker.