Do American Vineyards Deserve Grand Cru Status?

This story is from an installment of The Oeno Files, our weekly insider newsletter to the world of fine wine. Sign up here.

In the mid-1990s, around 10 years after he wowed the wine world with the first vintage of his Cabernet Sauvignon-based Pahlmeyer Proprietary Red, Jayson Pahlmeyer wanted to do the same with Pinot Noir and began searching for a vineyard. Working with a close friend who was a wine importer, he located two Grand Cru plots for sale in Burgundy and arranged for his winemaker Helen Turley to work hand-in-hand with Michel Niellon at his winery in Chassagne-Montrachet. Pahlmeyer’s daughter Cleo tells Robb Report that the deal fell through after the papers were signed due to a Burgundian real estate law that allows right of first refusal to locals. “After that disappointing experience, Jayson set his sights closer to home,” she says.

Next stop was the Wayfarer vineyard in the Fort Ross-Seaview AVA on the far west coast of Sonoma County. A farm named for the dream of its owners, Dave and Dorothy Davis, to travel the world, Wayfarer didn’t have any vines planted yet. In addition to growing organic produce for Alice Waters’s Chez Panisse restaurant in the 1970s, the Davises raised livestock, spun wool, and ran a small school. Turley and her husband, viticulturalist John Wetlaufer (both had helped find Pahlmeyer’s Atlas Peak vineyard site in Napa Valley), brought Jayson to Wayfarer to survey the land, and Turley had packed a homemade roast chicken alongside a magnum of her first vintage of Marcassin Chardonnay from their vineyard just down the road. The combination of that lunch alongside the cool sea air, the luminosity of the sun at elevation, and the bounty of fruits and vegetables growing so close to the Pacific caused the elder Pahlmeyer to realize that this was the ideal spot to branch out from Bordeaux-style blends and plant his Chardonnay and Pinot Noir.

Turley told Jayson the vineyard would be “the La Tache of California,” and he bought the land and recruited David Abreu (who has worked with the likes of Harlan, Screaming Eagle, and Colgin, to name a few) to develop the vineyard, which was completed in 2002. While the Pahlmeyers know that they can’t compete with Burgundy’s hundreds of years of history and an appellation system that goes back to the Cistercian monks in the 12th and 13th centuries, Cleo is on a quest for her Wayfarer Vineyard to be considered a New World Grand Cru. Having joined her father as partner in 2008 and produced their first vintage of Wayfarer Pinot Noir and Chardonnay in 2012, she defines this as “a vineyard in a place unlike anywhere else in the world and with a track record of consistency and quality.” In Bordeaux, Cru status is defined by producer and in Burgundy by terroir, but Cleo believes that here in the U.S. it can be determined by quality, heritage, and consistency of a vineyard site, as well as ageability of the wines and consensus from top professionals.

Although Fort Ross-Seaview has a mélange of soil types thanks to the San Andreas fault line that runs along the coast, Wayfarer sits on nothing but Goldridge soil throughout the entire vineyard. Derived from an ancient seabed and volcanic ash that impart striking mineral character and acidity in the wines, Goldridge is noted for its powdery texture, superlative drainage, and lack of organic matter, which cause vines to dig deep for water and nutrients, leading to smaller berries with more concentrated flavors. And one of the most important aspects of the soil is that its pH allows the fruit to maintain its acidity through fermentation.

“Every year for the last 23 years, we have been continuously learning about our site,” Cleo says. “We have learned that the elevation of the vineyard, between 920 and 1,200 feet, is above the fog line but below the inversion layer. Above the fog line, more hours of sun and brilliant luminosity bring distinctive structure to the Pinot Noir and a voluminous, fleshy texture to the Chardonnay. Below the inversion layer, our vineyard cools down at night, even during heat events.” Situated four miles from the Pacific Ocean, a little further inland than other vineyards in Fort Ross-Seaview (on the second rather than the first ridgeline), the vineyard is more protected than those closer to the coast. “It is a warm spot in an otherwise cool growing region, which allows us to farm to ideal phenolic ripeness,” she adds.

Basically, the combination of location, altitude, soil, sunshine, and cool ocean air creates a signature that cannot be replicated anywhere else in the world, which is really the idea behind cru status. Cleo believes that the United States is many years away from any formal recognition of vineyard quality. “The Burgundy classifications were developed over hundreds of years, and in California, we still speak in decades,” she says. “We are still very early in the process of determining which California vineyards are the best sites, and if a classification system is developed, it won’t happen in my or my children’s lifetimes.” Pahlmeyer is aware that values are different here than in France, with the United States being seen as the “land of opportunity” where capitalism is valued much more than the idea of culture or intangible heritage. While she would love to see an official designation proclaiming the high quality of Wayfarer Pinot Noir and Chardonnay, Cleo ultimately believes that Americans who care about single-vineyard wines will vote with their wallets. “I think it will be for the marketplace and the consumer rather than a government body to decide with their dollars which vineyards and estates are akin to Grand Cru status,” she says.

We don’t see any possible way that the TTB, the federal Alcohol and Tobacco Tax and Trade Bureau, which approves and regulates American Viticultural Areas and is responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing regulations on alcohol, is ever going to wade into the discussion as to which vineyards in the United States are deserving of special prominence. We could foresee individual regions permitting an exceptional designation akin to the viñedo singular classification that was recently added in Rioja, but until that time it is up to winery owners to get the word out about how extraordinary their vineyards are. At Wayfarer, the bottles speak for themselves.

Do you want access to rare and outstanding reds from Napa Valley? Join the Robb Report 672 Wine Club today.