A curved roof over the bay

From above, the hospitality building is a long curve of cedar under a pale roof, with dark window frames and a bed of young plantings in the soil out front. Late light lays the stakes in long shadows. Past the drive, the garden and the older roofs sit against the vines.

This is the oldest winery still working in the Carneros AVA. The ground was planted in the 1880s, and the estate that stands here now is family owned, estate grown, and sustainably farmed. Tatiana and Garrett Copeland hold it. Chris Kajani is president and winemaker, and the vineyard crew that works the rows with him has long been women.

The Calera clone takes its name from Josh Jensen's vines on Mount Harlan. This bottle is not that winery. It is Bouchaine's own block of the clone, kept apart from the other Pinot on the property, on ground that looks toward San Francisco Bay and, on a clear day, the financial district on the far water. Fog, wind, and the cold nights are what give the Pinot its shape.

Picked before the heat broke

The rows run in tight lines toward a dirt track, then out to a white house and a pale yellow house, and past them the hills go dry and gold. This is the Carneros edge of the estate, a hundred acres on the southern border of Napa Valley.

The 2022 season stayed in cool breeze and morning fog until a heat that lasted five days at the start of September. The fruit was already ready. Harvest on this block was September 1, 2022, the pick ran short, and the cellar filled fast. What came through was the fresh acidity the estate wants from this place, with a velvety structure and real depth under it.

The crew picked by hand at night so the berries stayed whole. The fruit sat in a cold soak for seven days, then fermented on the yeast that came in with it, in open-top tanks. The wine was drawn off, the must went to a basket press, and malolactic finished in French oak. A third of that oak was new. The block then stayed on its primary lees for ten months, hands off, until bottling on July 31, 2023. It finished dry, at 14.1% alcohol. The estate put 500 cases of this block into bottle, and the wine keeps opening, layer after layer.

Sage, then the fig

The estate sheet for this bottle names no plate. The wine is dry, with fresh acidity under a velvety frame, so the first plate is turkey and the second is pork with fruit.

Herb-roasted turkey breast, sage on the skin, is the larger of the two. Pan-roasted pork with figs is the deeper one, the fruit sitting against that acidity.