Maitre de Chai Cabernet Sauvignon 2021

Maître de Chai (May-TRUH de Shay) translates to 'keeper of the cellar', or the person responsible for the development and aging of wine. By extension, the humble cellar master is the person responsible for the management of the winery. Established in 2012, Maître de Chai is the personal project of Marty Winters and Alex Pitts. Together they look to make wines of high quality in a way that best showcases the sense of place where the grapes are grown and the personality of the vineyard. From the ground to the bottle, the character of the wine is the focus. Winters and Pitts source grapes from unique and distinct single vineyards that are impeccably farmed in California. 

As the name implies, these wines are cared for in the cellar. Firstly, Maître de Chai defers to nature and limits their intervention. Winters and Pitts taste and then wait, taste and then wait, allowing the wines to develop and speak for the places in which they are rooted.

The Gala Mountain Vineyard sits above the Napa Valley on the slopes of Mt. George, just east of the city of Napa. This northwest facing vineyard was planted in 1992 on rocky volcanic bedrock with sandy topsoil and is cooled by the constant breezes from the San Pablo Bay. The vines are well drained, deep rooting & produce small clusters, which lend to the structure of the wine. This six acre vineyard was converted from organic to biodynamic farming in 2018 and is tended to by hand.

This is the third vintage of this wine from incredible mountaintop fruit from a 6 acre vineyard up on Mount George on the eastern wall of the Napa Valley. Fermented in open top fermenters with minimal pump overs. A dense & powerful wine smelling of black fruits, roasted beet & licorice, with an herbal nose of mountain thyme and plum. This is a wine that will age for decades to come. 18 months in neutral oak, never fined or filtered. Tiny production.

The illustrative component of the Maître de Chai logo originated from an 1883 book titled The Wine Press and the Cellar by Emmett Rixford. This book served as one of the first guides to winemaking rather than grape growing. Rixford was a San Francisco attorney who planted his 40-acre “La Questa Vineyard” in the Santa Cruz mountains near Woodside in 1884, and in 1915 his cabernet won the Gold Medal at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. Today, 1 acre of his original vineyard remains within the 17-acre Woodside Vineyards. 

Lady Liberty, of statue fame, but based on the Roman goddess Libertas, stands next to an American flag shield. She holds a bottle of uncorked bubbles. The bear, a grizzly, rests against a barrel. While some versions of the California "bear flag" flew before this image, it predates the state's adoption of the flag in 1911. The bear on the state flag is based on Monarch, the famed "last wild grizzly" captured at the request of W.R. Hearst to be displayed in Golden Gate Park in 1889. The boxes at their feet originally signaled Pineau, Riesling, Zinfandel, and Mission. The labels at Maître de Chai now include a tiny nod to the grape in the bottles, including chardonnay, chenin blanc, sauvignon blanc, zinfandel and cabernet sauvignon.