How Schrader Cellars Mines the Depths of Napa Valley

It’s easy to think of single vineyards as monoliths, as singular expressions of terroir and micro-climate within the entirety of their borders. But that’s not the case at all: From the composition of the soil to the underlying geology and the ways in which sun and shade affect different parts of the land, there is often far more variation within single vineyards than is typically discussed. And when it comes to larger vineyards, those differences tend to be magnified.

Which is one of the many reasons that the wines produced by Schrader, especially from fruit grown on the iconic To Kalon Vineyard, are so fascinating: They don’t only tell the proverbial story of the vineyard itself, but also of specific blocks of it. On top of that, Schrader works with individual clones of Cabernet Sauvignon—specific genetic strains of the variety that possess unique characteristics both in how they grow in the vineyard and how they taste when vinified into wine.

Schrader’s CCS Cab (grown in Block C1 of To Kalon Vineyard), for example, is decidedly different from their MB Cab (grown in the Monastery Block, in the west of the vineyard and planted to a different clone). The team’s ability to translate unique terroirs throughout the vineyards they work with has made Schrader one of the most important producers in the region.

A Path Set at the Start

Schrader, it seems, was destined to take this approach from the beginning. The first wine that Thomas Rivers Brown made for Schrader was a single block bottling of To Kalon in 2000. Seeing the success of that wine, the team made it a point to gain access to other individual parcels, which is exactly what they accomplished. Around 2012, they were able to add a significant number of new blocks.

Rivers Brown is quick to point out, not all blocks are of equal quality, even in a venerated vineyard like To Kalon. “We had a really nice chunk, and we were every year looking at blocks that were available,” he says. But they didn’t just snap up every parcel that was offered. “If you’ve been to To Kalon, it starts at Highway 29 and it goes back towards the hill. The grapes close to the road are not very good,” he elaborates. “So when we got offered one or two of those blocks closest to the road, we’d almost always passed. I didn’t love the fruit in the back either for maybe the opposite reason. But there was that middle cut that we really loved. So every time blocks like that popped open, we’d grab them.” Ultimately, he notes, “We got up to 60 acres. I think one year we even hit 6,000 cases, which was kind of our high-water mark for quantity.”

The Schrader team’s care in choosing only the best blocks paid off brilliantly. “We just kept rolling,” he adds. [100-point scores] kept coming. The mailing list was building. Schrader was selling, I don’t know, $15 million worth of wine a year in about a week. So Schrader was the hottest thing in Napa for a really long time.” It continues to be today, too.That success and longevity are testaments to the power of the team’s vision, their unrelenting focus on quality, and their ability to see the majesty of the best blocks of some of the finest vineyard land in the world