The Iron Chevsky Wine Blog

Last year Araujo was acquired by the Artemis Group, the owners of Chateau Latour. With that, Araujo joined Opus One and Dominus , two others among Napa Valley's greatest wineries closely tied to Bordeaux's greatest estates (Chateau Mouton-Rothschild and Chateau Petrus, respectively). More info on the acquisition can be found  here  and  here . Four years since my last visit , I headed over to Calistoga to talk about the changes, and to taste the wines. The long time director of wine-making Francoise Peschon is no longer there, but her colleague winemaker Nigel Kinsman is still consulting. Largely a new team has been assembled with Frederic Engerer (Latour's president) and Helene Mingot as the Technical Director. Michel Rolland is gone, the Araujos moved on and aren't involved anymore. While the 2011 vintage was made entirely by the old team, the 2012 was the first vintage with the partial influence of the new ownership coming in at the blending phase. Arau...

At the top of Napa cabs are several cult wineries whose names cause drool from the lips of new world wine drinkers, followed by images of rapidly thinning wallet. Next to the likes of Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate and Bond Estate, Colgin and Bryant Family is Araujo . At 1600 cases of their first wine selling out at $275/bottle without any difficulty, this California darling manages to impress even old-world drinkers, especially when an opportunity arises to sample the goods with James Hayes - Araujo's VP of Sales and Marketing, previously the Wine Director at Thomas Keller's restaurant group (taking over from Paul Roberts with whom I recently met at Bond ), and Francoise Peschon, who has been overseeing Araujo’s winemaking for almost 20 years. All Araujo wines come from a single estate vineyard, called Eisele (pronounced "Eyes-lee") that has been continuously cultivated since the late 1800's. Cabernet vines were first planted in the 1960's. Until Bart and ...