The Hill Above the Lake

Pritchard Hill is Napa’s high ground in every sense — a rocky ridge east of the valley proper, above Lake Hennessey, where the vineyards sit at over a thousand feet, out of the fog and into thinner, poorer soil. The address has no appellation of its own and needs none; the short list of estates farming it made the name a synonym for Napa’s most vertical wines. Colgin’s IX Estate is among the definitive examples: a small property planted after Ann Colgin and Joe Wender acquired the land in the late 1990s, with vines between 1,100 and 1,300 feet of elevation.

Colgin began in 1992 as a négociant-style label built on famous purchased fruit; IX Estate was the house putting down its own roots, and it quickly became the flagship. The wine is a Bordeaux blend rather than a pure Cabernet — the 2005 runs 64% Cabernet Sauvignon and 21% Merlot with Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot completing it — which matters to how it ages: the blend was always meant to be architecture, not varietal display.

2005 at Sixteen

2005 in Napa was a generous, even season with a long, cool finish — a big crop that ripened slowly, giving wines with both flesh and line. In its youth the IX Estate from this year was described in the language of scale: scorched earth, blueberry and blackcurrant, charcoal and spice, violets over the top, full-bodied and firmly structured.

Sixteen years on, the scale remained but the wine had reorganised itself around the structure. The fruit had moved from blue to black-red and dried at the edges, the oak had disappeared into the frame, and the mountain tannin — fine-grained but insistent — was carrying the wine rather than guarding it. This is the practical argument for hillside Napa: valley-floor opulence tends to soften into comfort, while the hill wines keep their shape as they age. At this bottle’s age the shape was the pleasure.

American Night

The table was pure California ambition flanked by Champagne: a magnum of Veuve Clicquot La Grande Dame 1990, Prieuré-Roch’s Le Clos des Corvées 2011 as the Burgundian dissent, and a Sine Qua Non — the “B 20” Syrah, from the same untameable house whose white from 2015 appears elsewhere in this archive, and whose B 20 from another bottle had been opened four months before this one. Two schools of California maximalism side by side: Krankl’s feral, one-off expressionism and Colgin’s polished, Bordeaux-framed precision. The evening did not pick a winner, and neither will this note — the point of a night like that is the distance between the answers.