Thanks for visiting PRIME Napa Valley wines!

Why PRIME?

prime   [prahym]
adj.
           1. first in excellence, quality, or value: a prime example
           2. of the greatest relevance or significance: a prime artifact
           3. of the greatest commercial value: prime real estate

  After working with grapes from all over California, PRIME's winemaker, Ted Henry, launched PRIME Cellars with the 2005 vintage to focus on a prime piece of Napa Valley called Coombsville.  With its cooler temperatures and unique flavor and acid profile, Coombsville was approved as Napa Valley's newest AVA in 2012.  In 2013 we opened our Downtown Napa tasting room at 974 Franklin Street.

Ted remains the winemaker at Napa Valley's Jarvis Estate and has been making wine in Napa Valley since his graduation from UC Davis' winemaking program in 1999.  PRIME wines are extremely limited with production levels of less than 1000 cases annually.  SIGN UP for our new wine club here.

Visit our tasting room in Downtown Napa

974 Franklin St. Napa CA 94559

Reflections from the front window

OPEN!
Please visit us at our new tasting room at 974 Franklin St. in Downtown napa.  We are right across from Oenotri and Norman Rose restaurants as well as the new Andaz hotel.  We're here daily from noon to 6pm, we would love to see you.

PRIME Napa Valley- the Coombsville connection

 © 2003, AirphotoUSA LLC, The Winemaker's Dance by Jonathan Swinchatt and David G. Howell

I love this satellite picture, it really tells the Coombsville story in one image.

Coombsville is the newest area to be considered for American Viticultural Area (AVA) within Napa Valley.  When I started PRIME the concept was to find "prime" vineyard locations within Napa.  I worked with fruit from all over but because of the high quality I kept returning to this Southeastern part of Napa known as Coombsville.  The black line shows the boundary of this new AVA.  It is a dramatic and unique piece of geology.  You can see in the center a hill and then a circular valley around it.  This is what is called the "cup and saucer" and is an indication of the special volcanic soils that lie beneath.

The grapes from Coombsville give PRIME its unique profile of crisp, fresh fruit with higher than usual acid levels and long finishes.  I hope you enjoy drinking the wines as much as I have making them!

Dining in ATL just got better

I've spent a fair amount of time in Atlanta's ATL airport.  Partly because I'm partial to Delta and end up there on connecting flights and partly because I really like Atlanta and its food/wine scene.  I often wander around the airport looking at the food options, riding the train to other terminals hoping for better fare than a TGI Fridays.  Other than the fairly cool piano lounge in terminal E the One Flew South  Sushi meets Southern cooking restaurant is the best I have seen in an airport.  Perhaps it is also the most expensive but sometimes it is worth the cost if you are captive for hours with a delayed flight.

Brian Hannigan was kind enough to send a photo to PRIME of his family enjoying a bottle of PRIME at One Flew South the other day and I wanted to post it here.  That's Susan on the left and Melissa on the right.  I can't tell you how excited I was to receive this picture of a group in an airport across the country enjoying my wine.  Its amazing to see where the few hundred cases of PRIME I make end up!

Mystery: District 4 Cab, Oxbow and the man with the accent

I was passing by the Oxbow wine merchant a few days ago and noticed our District 4 Cabernet was unfortunately missing from the shelves.   I'm thinking, Great, how long have they been out? On a seemingly unrelated note I got a call from an East Coast Prime fan (with a terrific accent) that was on vacation in Napa and was looking for the wine.  Turns out after I missed his call he stopped by the Oxbow in Napa for lunch and by chance saw the District 4 and bought all they had in stock.

All the pieces came together the next day when a 2 case order came in from the wine merchant and the customer let me know he found what he was looking for.  Mystery solved, time for a glass of wine.

Prime time at the Oxbow Market

Not that you need another reason to visit the Oxbow Public Market in Napa but I'm going to give you one anyway.  Aside from my longtime favorite Taylor's Refresher (aka Gott's) there is a new excellent reason to show up at the Oxbow at least once a week.


The Oxbow Wine Merchant has picked up PRIME's 2007 District 4 Cabernet and is going to be pouring it by the glass.  Located directly across from Hog Island's oyster bar, you can't miss the shop so stop in and have a glass!  Don't forget to look for PRIME by the glass in San Francisco at Foreign Cinema, First Crush and Inner Fog too.

News from the recent tasting in SF

There should be much more hoopla for the recent release of our 2007 Prime Cabernet Sauvignon "Midoriya Hills Vineyard". Everyone else is giving it much more attention than we are. It is at least available on our website, with more info to come soon.

Ted poured at the public tasting for the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition. Just discovered this nice write up regarding the tasting. Thanks to Frank Thorsburg of Wine Country Insider.

http://fthorsberg.wordpress.com/2011/02/24/tasting-winners/

A hot one in Napa

It is currently 80 degrees here in Napa.  Hardly seems like February but a nice enough day to take apart some of Prime's old barrels.  I took some time before the Superbowl to disassemble some barrels that I bought in 2007.  It takes a lot less time break them up than it does to make them.  That being said, I am always amazed at how well wine barrels are made.  It takes a lot of pounding with a mighty big hammer to convince them to fall into a pile of staves.  Its really amazing that these are made with only pressure holding them together.  No nails, glue, screws etc.  This batch looks likely to become firewood but you never know, maybe yard art if this heat keeps up.

A toast to 2011...

A huge thanks to all the supporters of PRIME Napa Valley's efforts over the last year.  2010 was a terrific year for us.  The wines received some great press that turned into quite a few new customers.  The best part of the job is getting to meet the people that love the wines.  It is all of you that have shown so much excitement over the  last year that make us want to do even better in 2011.


Speaking of New Years: Everyone seems to do a "best of" list to hit the highlights of the outgoing year.  I never expected to make any of those so I assure you it was a pleasant surprise to come in at #8 at senelwine.com's top 10 wines of the year list!  Check out what he has to say about the 2008 District 4 Chardonnay by clicking here.  My favorite quote: "Move over Sbragia, there's a new Chardonnay ace in town" 


(for those under-informed on wine trivia: Sbragia=Ed Sbragia, famous longtime Beringer winemaker.)

SF Vintners Market

1pm

5pm

The pictures are from the Vintners Market in San Francisco in November. It started out pretty quiet and then a few hours later the crowds hit the back where we were at. I tried to get a picture from the same angle of before and after the crowd came. These types of events are important to us because they give us a chance to meet directly with consumers and in turn these consumers (aka "you") can buy our wine that day and walk out with it. Since we are too small to have a tasting room, it is like a rotating occasional version of a tasting room. We met lots and lots of people during this two day event, thanks to all those who stopped by our table. The magnums were a big hit, maybe for holiday gifts? We will keep you posted on any other "try and buy" events we might be doing next year.

The Bay Bridge in the clear window pane.

2010 Harvest: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ah, 2010 vintage. For me this has been the most unusual year to date since I started making wine in Napa in 1999.  The Summer was very cool and the grapes were weeks behind a normal ripening schedule.

Newbie "Merus" Vineyard

The good was that my new vineyard looked great this year.  This site, that I share with Merus, is textbook perfect in appearance. Here's a pic on harvest day:

The fruit had great flavor and crop level through the Summer and was lookig like it was going to quickly ripen to perfection.

Rain

Thats when the bad happened.  Rain.  Lots of rain.  I was out in the vineyard in a rainstorm tasting grapes and I was surprised on how good the fruit was tasting.  The only problem was that the rain leads to mildew and the vines could only handle a week or so after the last rain before the fruit had to come in.  I think the full potential of this new site probably was not achieved but still I'm tasting some really excellent (and really young) wine from it.



All went well in the winery this year, Jeff and the crew were excellent as usual.  I caught this shot of the last of the juice leaving the hopper on the way to the destemmer-crusher.  I'm hopefull for a happy ending to this year's vintage, only time will tell but so far so good...
 

Last drops of 2010

The Ugly, 90% of Midoriya was lost

Oh, I forgot about the ugly.  Poor Midoriya Hills Vineyard was devistated by the weather.  The cool summer followed by a couple of heat spikes just killed the fruit on the vine.  It shriveled up and died a premature death, well before it was ripe enough to harvest.  I did manage to salvage about 1000 pounds of fruit, and while it looked less that ideal the wine is tasting surprisingly good!

PRIME 2010 Chardonnay

Chard SS and oak barrels

The Berry Lane Chardonnay has officially finished fermentation and made the transition from grape juice to wine.  This is the view as you shine a flashlight into the barrel, the juice is bubbling indicating the release of carbon dioxide and the conversion of sugar to alcohol.

This last week each barrel tested at -1.7 Brix telling me that the fermentation is over (avoided the dreaded "stuck fermentation").  Today we will top up the barrels and send samples to the lab to find out the alcohol, acid levels, residual sugar etc.  Now I can go back to worrying about the Cabernet...

HydeAway Events in San Francisco

On September 16th we participated in a very cool event on the San Francisco waterfront. There was a collective of six small vintners, music by a talented trio, more food that people could consume and it was held in the historic Maritime Museum which has recently been renovated. It is called HydeAway and if this name doesn't sound familiar to you then you are not on our mailing list. The location will change to other areas of the San Francisco Maritime National Park (all near and on Hyde Street Pier). It is invitation only but we do send out an invite to our mailing list so make sure you are on it today! The next one is in November.

View of Alcatraz from the top deck of Balclutha

Gerard's Paella

Trio - but you could probably figure that one out on your own

2010 Harvest. What's that all about?

Winemaker update for y'all (just got back from Texas).  I think most of you may have heard but we have had about the coolest Summer on record in Napa.  That is until a massive heatwave at the end of August and then another one this last week.  Its kind of a catch 22 situation, if its too cool and foggy you have to pull leaves around the fruit to help it dry out and avoid molds.  Yet if you pull the leaves and then you get a ridiculous heat wave the fruit gets fried and can turn to raisins.

The "Merus" block has been saved from this predicament by Larry's quick action with the water valves.  Sadly, Midorya Hills fell victim to the heat spikes this year.  The good news is the damage to Midoriya seems to only be an issue with the quantity, not the quality of the fruit.  For some unknown reason the fruit that was exposed to the sun just decided to die off.  Hopefully what is left will have twice the flavor.  We will see.  The Berry Lane Chardonnay also shows the raisining effect with most of the fruit in good shape but some of the exposed berries turned scary black.

Our handy de-stemmer machine takes the grapes off the stems and leaves the raisins behind.  So, other than the lack of fruit we should be in excellent position for an amazing year when it comes to quality.

TED

Glass of Wine, Dinner and a Movie!

Prime Cabernet is being poured by the glass at Foreign Cinema in San Francisco. This is a very unique restaurant that plays movies on the back wall while you eat dinner. The food is excellent too (we have been there recently). Here is the movie line up.

The Young Up-Start!

Cheers to the winemaker, Ted! Erol Senel talks about our Cabernet and Chardonnay and we can't help but agree.

http://content.corkd.com/2010/09/14/napa-valley-ushers-out-the-tired-names-of-yesteryear-and-replaces-them-with-up-and-coming-superstars/

Wine labels: Paper vs Silk Screen

Monvera is company out of Ikeaville Emeryville, CA that produces some really cool "glass decor" as they call it.  They just started a beautiful bottle of the week series of videos and PRIME made it to episode #3!  Monvera is a great company with great people and we're excited that they picked our Midoriya Hills Cab for their video series.                                                                                                                                                                     

Obviously, since they are in the business of selling alternatives to paper labels they tend to have an anti-paper bias.  In the video you see our regular label as well as the screen print that Monvera did for us. Apparently more than 99% of wines in the market have paper labels so the screen print is somewhat unusual.
                                                                                                                                                                   It got me thinking, should PRIME go paperless?  I like the look on our "Reserve" wines but is it worth the extra $? Is there something to be said for the traditional appeal of paper? I'm not sure myself but we're always open to suggestions.  As in: comment please, what labels type do you like best traditional paper or fancy screen print?  Thanks!

Cause for Paws

We were invited to pour for the Cause for Paws benefiting Napa Humane and hosted by Mark and Anna Pope of The Bounty Hunter. The people who put this event on know what they are doing! There was a great array of food and wine and a giveaway bag for everyone who came (mostly stuff for your four legged friends, but some coupons for the human variety too).

We managed to mostly control ourselves, despite pouring next to Three Twins Ice Cream (three scoops between the two of us is showing self control right?)

We also met Amy from Oakville Ranch who was a pleasure to share a table with.

All in all, I would recommend this event to all who like food, wine, and animals. They had cats and dogs on site available for adoption, which was equally hard for us to resist. Our cat Baylee and our dog Murphy may have had an opinion on new family members but the kids wouldn't have been upset.

   

Where to find us!

Here are the places that have Prime Cellars wine in Southern California. Thank you for your support!

Broadway Deli - Santa Monica

Capo - Santa Monica

Cedar Creek Restaurant - Laguna Niguel

Cucina Urbana - San Diego

Golden Truffle - Costa Mesa

Sorrento Grille - Laguna Beach

SF Chronicle recommends Prime- read all about it!

It was a great surprise to see a picture of our 2007 District 4 Cab in Sunday's Chronicle.  Its a big honor when the nation's best paper (west coast bias here) recommends people go out and try your wine.

Reading on it mentions that they considered 80 or so wines and booted out all but 15 that appear in the article.  Congrats to the winemaker (-Oh wait, that's me), to Carlos who did the most of the vineyard work and to Lisa who makes everything else happen!

In case you missed that link here it is again.  Also, since we are just releasing the '07 you might notice that it does not yet appear at our online store, we're working on that, it will be up soon.