Meet Napa’s New Wave of All-Star Consulting Winemakers

• By WineBottleMag
• November 15, 2024
• AllStar Consulting Meet Napas Wave Winemakers
• With 0 comments

The Napa Valley Premiere, the storied California winemaking region’s annual trade auction, has no shortage of exclusive and elusive cuvees. Naturally, the bids are big. In 2024, 167 lots brought in over $3 million at the auction. 

Surprisingly, the top lot of this year’s auction wasn’t a classic cult Cabernet or a marquee red blend—the bottles that usually send collectors into a frenzy. It was a newcomer’s very first vintage. The paddle price? $70,000 for five cases Fairest Creature 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon, an inky, expressive Cab sourced from grapes grown both high and low in the valley, then aged 19 months in new French oak—$1,166 a bottle.

To understand why those cases netted such a high result, look to how the wine was made. 

When Fairest Creature owner Jayson Hu set out to produce a California Cab, he assembled an Avengers-esque panel of consultants to weigh in on the viticulture and oenology: Bordeaux-born Philippe Melka, known for Lithology and Lail’s richly structured and age-worthy reds; Lyon-bred winemaker Benoit Touquette, who specializes in California wines with a French accent; and Thomas Rivers Brown, a South Carolina kid turned Napa powerhouse who has a knack for making artful but hyper-precise wines. The three would each select vines and make a wine that reflects their personal style. Then they’d then hand it off to Michel Rolland, a renowned enologist, to blend it together. 

These four are part of a growing fleet of all-star wine consultants who come with promises of great grapes, prime vineyards and gold-level scores. Launching a new brand? Struggling with slumping sales? Dream of making a world-class wine? They’re who you call. These consultants represent a shift in the way wine is made. While the name on a label is what winds up getting accolades, free agents might be behind your next favorite bottle.

Below, we take a look at the most famous wine consultants working today, what they make and for whom. 

The New Guard

As the star consultant trend grows, it’s received its fair share of critics. Karen MacNeil recently wondered if leaning on a handful of winemakers just results in sameness, particularly in the Napa Valley where cuvees are dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon. One grape, one region, one winemaker consulting on multiple brands—it provokes questions of monotony. 

“All of these wineries make plush, soft, well-structured, very expensive Cabernet Sauvignon. Is it a problem if many of them taste largely the same?” said MacNeil.

While the question is valid, for the most part these hired-gun winemakers are like good producers, brought in to tweak a track, rearrange and remix while keeping the author’s original vision intact. The name-brand appeal is apparent—there are over 500 wineries in the Napa Valley alone, a big name will help a brand stand out—but they also offer connections to prime vineyards and an expert hand (and palate). 

Philippe Melka

Bordeaux-born Melka has a rap sheet that is a mile long. His current clients include St. Helena’s Merryvale, Roy Estate, Lail, Lithology and Namo—wineries that all center Cabernet Sauvignon (along with a selection of Chardonnays and Sauvignon Blancs). And while he consults for so many heavyweights, he’s found the time to open his own label, Melka Estates.

Melka’s expertise comes from a long history of working with the greats. He studied geology, agronomy and enology at the University of Bordeaux, which led him to a soil internship at a little winery called Château Haut-Brion. A meeting with Jean-Claude Berrouet, of Château Petrus, parlayed into a job at Dominus, in California. Dominus led to Ridge, where he  encountered a charming lab technician. A wedding ensued and in 1995, Melka and his wife, Cherie (an enologist who worked at Ridge and Silver Oak) formed Melka Consulting, signing Lail and Constant Diamond Mountains.

Melka is focused on opulent reds with an impressive ability to age (Lail 2017 Blueprint Cabernet was Wine Enthusiast’s top wine of 2020); however, he doesn’t dictate what his clients should make. Instead, his expertise is playing matchmaker. He knows the valley intimately, and can list off the upsides of hyper-specific plots and microclimates. This means that when his client wants to make a specific wine, he’s able to pair them up with the exact right vineyards. Then he lends his palate to the blend. 

Thomas Rivers Brown

Brown has a Midas touch and an affinity for working with big figures. He’s worked with antique dealers (Schrader) and Baseball hall-of-famers (Seaver Vineyards), NFL executives (GTS) and Tony Award-winning producers (Kinsella Estate). Despite the proximity to characters, his wines are reserved, with a careful command over oak.  

With such a well developed palate, it might be surprising to learn that Brown winemaking wasn’t his first plan. He grew up in a Southern Baptist household where alcohol was taboo, graduated from the University of Virginia with a degree in economics and literature and never pursued a formal wine education. But he was curious and a quick study, and by the late ’90s he was working at Turley Wine Cellars. 

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In the 2000s, Brown’s work with Schrader started digging into different, hyper-specific terroirs within the Valley, including a large section of To Kalon. People paid attention—the winery has earned 27 100-point scores from major wine media, including Wine Enthusiast, thanks to Brown. He’s now got a stable of consulting clients (including Wallis Estate, Aston and Far Niente) and the majority are produced at his Rivers-Marie winery in Calistoga.

Andy Erickson

Andy Erickson cut his teeth at some of the most recognizable wineries: a harvest at Stag’s Leap, a college job at Spottswoode followed by a decade at Harlan Estate, Staglin Family Vineyard and Screaming Eagle. After five years running the latter, Erickson left to focus on other projects and consulting gigs. 

The Bordeaux-inspired winery Arietta, the historic To Kalon Vineyards and Mayacamas have all bloomed under his hand. His secret? He keeps things simple, choosing to let the vintage dictate the wine. He’s a therapist for the vines, helping each wine show its best self. 

Outside of his clients, he also handles his own passion projects, like Leviathan, a mountain Cab project, and Favia, a farm-focused winery he started with his wife in their garage. 

The Old Guard of Consulting Winemakers 

Before all of the aforementioned consultants stepped into the spotlight, there were the Napa OGs. They helped build some of the valley’s most iconic, category-defining brands, then extended beyond their brand to help bolster the rest of the region. Napa’s history isn’t quite complete without their names. Here’s why.

Heidi Barrett

She’s the first lady of wine, the queen of cult Cabernet. Barrett put Screaming Eagle on the map, and racked 100-point scores that earned the winery its cult status. 

Her current roster includes Paradigm, Kenzo Estate and Fantesca (plus her own project La Sirena), but she has strict rules of engagement when working with a winery. First, they must have the intention of making something exceptional. Second, they must be within half an hour driving or flying (she’s an accomplished helicopter pilot) distance from her home. Those clients are lucky because the wines she makes are known for both their extraordinary qualities (elegant and opulent even in a wine’s youth) and their economic draws. One of her wines holds the record for Napa Valley Premiere’s priciest auction lot: $500,000 for a six-liter bottle of Screaming Eagle’s first vintage.

Barrett is also at the center of a Northern California winemaking dynasty. Her husband Bo is the winemaker at Chateau Montelena and her children have also gotten in on the game. Her daughter Chelsea is the winemaker at Materra (in addition to being the co-pilot of Barrett Wines) and other daughter Remi runs La Sirena with her.

Paul Hobbs

Many of today’s star consultants were guided to their formative roles by Paul Hobbs. He’s a New Yorker who initially dreamed of becoming a surgeon, but got pulled away from medicine by Robert Mondavi to help start his then-new project: a venture called Opus One. 

His current kingdom extends far beyond Napa: he’s keenly curious about the cross section of history and modern winemaking, and runs projects in Argentina, Armenia, the Finger Lakes and Galicia. 

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The International Contingent

The Napa Valley is ripe with winemakers who oversee projects between Carneros and Calistoga. But outside of the Valley’s confines are another class of winemakers, whose preferred commute is via plane. 

Michel Rolland

One of the first “flying” winemakers—jetsetting winemakers who criss-cross the globe to make new cuvees—Rolland was raised in Bordeaux and learned about the industry at his family’s Pomerol, Saint-Émilion and Lalande de Pomerol estates. Together with his wife, he then took over a Pomerol oenology lab, where they started analyzing the region’s wines. This experience gave him a savvy knowledge of what grapes need from the wine making process in order to coax out their best qualities, which helped form his fruit-forward style.

Fast forward and the consultant oversees around 100 estates in 15 countries: famed French Chateaus, California legends (Harlan, Staglin), Italy’s Ornellaia and wineries in India, South Africa and Argentina. 

Most recently, he was brought in to help Château Figeac when the Saint-Émilion winery was aiming for a higher classification. It was a good call—Wine Enthusiast’s Roger Voss gave Château-Figeac 2018 Saint-Émilion a 100 point score. “This wine has density and immense structure balanced by stunning black fruits that give impressive promise,” says Voss in his review. “This powerful wine is probably the greatest ever produced from this estate.”

Benoit Touquette

Lyonnaise-born, Bordeaux-trained Touquette landed in Napa Valley in the 2000s and learned from the greats. Rolland mentored him early in his career, which led to a job alongside Erickson. Screaming Eagle, Ovid and Dalle Valle vintages came and went until 2007, when he launched his own consultancy. Realm (a Napa brand Benoit and Scott Becker lovingly brought up from near-extinction) and Fait-Main (a California wine with a French accent) are his current babies.

His signature is his keen focus on vineyard management. Healthy vines make great wine, so he prioritizes a blend of organic and biodynamic methods to get the best expression of place possible. His wines are meticulous but also authentic to the vineyards they came from—artistic, harmonious but also exacting. 

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