Viognier, the complex, aromatic white wine grape native to France’s Rhône Valley, has been produced at Miner Family as long as almost any other. Its history here in Oakville is, in fact, intrinsic to the winery’s identity.
But in relation to our Napa Valley location, this variety is something of an outlier.
The first fifteen vintages came from an improbable spot in the fertile farmland of the San Joaquin Valley: John Simpson’s vineyard near Fresno, a low-yielding site that was a dependable source of viognier and helped put Miner’s version on the map.
Eventually, wanting to make a change to a different region and microclimate, Dave Miner and Michelle Shafrir opted to start working with the owners of Steinbeck Vineyard. This expertly farmed property in the Geneseo District of Paso Robles is a widely recognized site for a number of wine grapes, viognier prominent among them. It’s been a successful partnership since our first forays with the Steinbeck fruit a decade ago.
Around that same time, after the 2013 vintage, a second and much smaller viognier program came to an end at Miner: our Wild Yeast Viognier, also made from Simpson Vineyard grapes. It was a cousin to Miner’s popular white wine, the Wild Yeast Chardonnay.
Each was notable for its spontaneous fermentation started by “wild” yeast living within the winery walls—as opposed to in the vineyard, as Michelle explained to us recently. “The yeast is just hanging out all over the winery; it’s on the floors, on the walls, and probably all over us, too!” she laughed.
“Then this amazing thing happens when, right before harvest, somehow the yeasts know what’s going on. Their populations actually start to grow, especially at the winery doors, like they anticipate something coming.” The primary fermentation in the cellar, as she described it, “must be like a volcano of yeast that we just don’t see.”
Before this pair of wild-fermented wines went into bottle, they were further differentiated from other Miner whites by the addition of 100% malolactic and barrel fermentation—a protocol unchanged in the chardonnay since the ’99 harvest.
In 2023, Dave decided it was time to revisit the past.
“We were talking about our viognier at one point last year,” Michelle said. “Dave mentioned to me how much he loved the Wild Yeast Viognier that we made years ago. So, then he asked the question: ‘Why aren’t we making it anymore? I think we should try this again.’”
She pointed out that that the ’23 vintage was an ideal window to revive this special bottling of viognier. Well before the harvest, she and Dave had initiated a conversation with a Mendocino County grower whose name was synonymous with some of the most forward-thinking viticulture in California: Stuart Bewley. Working out of his 150-acre Alder Springs Vineyard near the town of Laytonville, Stuart was known for producing small lots of extremely high-quality grapes, sought after by vintners up and down the state. Of the astounding 90-plus varieties he grows, viognier was the one that caught this winery’s attention.
“The first time I met Stuart several years ago, we got along really well,” Dave recalled. “After that, I was pushing to try to get some viognier from him, which would let us play around with grapes from a different climate than what we’d been doing up to that point, the viognier from Madera County and then Paso Robles. I wanted to see what a little bit colder climate would do.”
He added that Michelle was enthusiastic about the new grape source. And she agreed that Alder Springs represented an opportunity to create a counterpoint to one of Miner’s signature wines. “Getting a little bit of ‘23 viognier from them, this was a chance to make it all by itself, and in a different style than we’ve been making the Steinbeck Viognier,” she said.
If the stylistic detour up to Mendocino signaled a conscious effort to do things differently with this noble grape, as Dave and Gary Brookman had done with the earlier version of Wild Yeast Viognier, it also served as a sort of geographic bookend to the Paso Robles program. Going back to 2014, Steinbeck Vineyard has been the southernmost site to supply the winery with fruit. Now, with the soon-to-be-released ’23 Alder Springs bottling, Miner is delving into a grape source at a near-opposite end of the viticultural spectrum.
These points north and south on the California map are a study in contrasts. And yet, to both Michelle’s and Dave’s palates, the vineyards are tied together by how the viognier grown in each reminds them of one of France’s great white wines made from the same variety: Condrieu.
Based near this historic appellation in France’s Northern Rhône Valley, a trio of respected winemakers whom Dave counts as friends—Yves Gangloff, François Villard, and Yves Cuilleron—have been visiting Napa Valley and Miner since the early 2000s. Back at home, these vignerons produce their own unique styles of Condrieu: extraordinary takes on viognier that have exerted a long-distance influence on Dave’s own goals for the grape.
From 2004 to 2011, he and François even collaborated at Miner on a second label, La Diligence, focused on the Rhône varieties marsanne and syrah grown in Stagecoach Vineyard. While viognier was never part of that program, François and his friends have paid attention over the years to how this cherished Rhône grape has been rendered in Miner’s cellar.
“Those guys always loved both wines—the Wild Yeast Viognier and the regular version,” Dave shared. “For them, the Wild Yeast was more like a very traditional Condrieu style. But they were also into the regular Simpson Viognier because it had the viognier ‘fleshiness’ and texture, but at the same time it had brightness. There was a freshness to it that they appreciated.”
As a reminder of how small the wine world can be, Dave’s three friends have, together and separately, also made past visits to Stuart Bewley’s property. In mid-2024, the grower shared this piece of information with us during a (very bumpy) two-hour tour of Alder Springs in his burly Land Cruiser. It was just one of many stories he had to tell.
Though grapegrowing is Stuart’s primary activity, to call Alder Springs a “vineyard” is a bit of a misnomer. His 150 acres of vineyards are planted within a massive, 6000-acre ranch of wild forest, steep hillsides, and 1000-foot changes in elevation. Just twelve miles inland from the tiny town of Westport on the Mendocino Coast, the Pacific Ocean is a constant, climactic presence; the place, he emphasized while driving slowly past one of the property’s numerous ponds, is very wet.
“We have about six ponds like this one,” he explained over the growl of the truck engine. “All of them are for rain runoff storage. And so we don’t pull any water out of the creeks or anything like that. We store it in the winter. There is so much water here in the winter, it’s ridiculous.”
Managing that water—in particular the runoff from his dozens of vineyard blocks, which gets fed back into the adjacent forest through a complex series of what he described as “reverse French drains”—is one of the many innovative approaches Stuart takes to growing wine grapes. Some of the strategies he, his Vineyard Manager José Guillen, and Viticulturist Dalton Shepherd put to use are more recent, while others have been evolving for the 30-plus years he’s owned the property.
When, back in 2003, Stuart had been farming grapes for ten years, the “two Yves” from the Rhône Valley—Gangloff and Cuilleron—arrived one day for a tour of the vineyard with a mutual California winemaker friend who wanted him to plant some viognier and marsanne. The result of that visit was a block of vines that he half-jokingly called “The Two Yves Block,” after the Frenchmen’s advice on where and what he should plant. “That section is where we started growing our Rhône whites. And, you know, those vines have done really well. They’ve made some really nice wine,” he observed with pride.
It was the genesis of white Rhône varieties at Alder Springs, folded into the much larger project of experimentation with “alternative” and lesser-known vines. Seventeen acres of pinot noir are the largest planting in the vineyard. But, as becomes clear after just a little time spent with Stuart in his Land Cruiser, viognier and the dozens of other grape varieties on the property get his and his team’s full attention.
Dave and Michelle’s conversation last year about bringing the Wild Yeast Viognier back into production at Miner led them to Alder Springs, where they joined an exclusive club of winery clients for Stuart’s grapes. “I think that wines can be so many things,” he told us. “And I don’t think you need to make just one version or just one style. I love all of the interpretations. I mean, we’ve got multiple winemakers making tons of different things. I think it’s fascinating.”Soon, after what Michelle reminded us was a ten-year hiatus, Miner Family enthusiasts will have an opportunity to be fascinated by Wild Yeast Viognier once again.