Diamond Creek founder Al Brounstein designed his labels to look like a “wanted” poster from the Old West. He hand-laid the letters himself in the 1970s.
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The private tasting room at Diamond Creek Vineyards.
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A map of the Diamond Creek property shows its four different vineyards, each of which has a distinct soil type.
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If any Napa Valley winery can truly be called old-school, it’s Diamond Creek Vineyards.
The Calistoga estate is part of a small class in Napa that can claim not only a long history, but also a reputation for an anachronistic style. The prototypical old-school Napa Cabernet — now often revered as “1970s-style” — tends to be lower in alcohol, greener in flavor and rougher in texture than the polished, fruity wines of modern times. Like many Napa vineyards of a certain age vineyards (think Dunn, Togni, Mayacamas), Diamond Creek is located on a mountain, where rockier soils and higher elevations can yield those chewy, unwieldy tannins — and where particularly stubborn personality types, intent on shaping great wine from unforgiving ground, have tended to flock.
But this old-school property has entered a new era. In 2020, the powerful French Champagne company Maison Louis Roederer bought Diamond Creek Vineyards from the family that founded it in the late 1960s. And Roederer USA president Nicole Carter isn’t shy about the changes that her new regime has made. “When the property was purchased, there was an understanding that there was quite a lot of work to do,” she said.
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Winemaker Graham Wehmeier, who previously worked at Futo Estate, joined Diamond Creek in 2020.
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Her team has replanted significant portions of Diamond Creek’s 20 acres, including removing some surviving 1972 vines in a corner of the property known as the Lake vineyard. Winemaker Graham Wehmeier, who joined in 2020 — just the third winemaker since its inception — instated updates in the cellar too, changing the approach to oak and extraction.
For an institution like Diamond Creek, these are the sorts of changes that can upset or even alienate longtime fans, who often seem to be searching for reasons to be suspicious of corporate ownership. But Diamond Creek represents a takeover done right. Roederer has preserved the elements essential to the winery’s antique charm, like the Western-inspired labels. And Wehmeier’s shifts to winemaking and viticulture have arguably made the Diamond Creek wines more old-school than they’d been in a long time, returning the wines to a style that made them beloved in the first place.
When Diamond Creek started, it was startlingly modern. Its commitment to Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa Valley was prescient, and its insistence on delineating different vineyard segments according to their terroir was an audacious bet that paid off.
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Al Brounstein, who bought this Diamond Mountain parcel with his wife Adelle “Boots” Brounstein in 1967, knew he wanted to make Cabernet Sauvignon. He’d caught the Cabernet bug while working the harvest at Ridge, whose owners at the time were his friends, in the Santa Cruz Mountains. To start his own vineyard, he’d even smuggled vine cuttings from Bordeaux in a suitcase he brought into the country through Tijuana.
The creek from which Diamond Creek Vineyards takes its name is studded with quartz crystals, which some have called diamonds.
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The creek from which the new winery took its name was studded with quartz crystals, which the neighbors affectionately called diamonds, Brounstein would later recall in an interview with Wine Spectator. He had his property’s soils analyzed and discovered that he had at least three distinct, yet contiguous, areas within the property. At the time, single-vineyard wines were virtually unheard of in California, let alone wines that represented sub-sections of the same property (what we now might call block-designate wines).
The Brounsteins dubbed the warmest part of the property Volcanic Hill. The soil of this 8-acre, south-facing vineyard is marked by white, fluffy volcanic ash; it would go on to produce Diamond Creek’s most powerful, concentrated Cabernets.
A steep 7-acre slope, Red Rock Terrace, is packed with rocky, iron-rich soils, and its north-facing aspect would lead to restrained, bright wines. Gravelly Meadow, a cooler, flatter, 5-acre plot of pebbly brown soil, shows earthier, mineral-driven flavors.
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Diamond Creek has 20 acres of vines, divided into four distinct vineyards.
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A final section, the property’s coolest and smallest site at just three-quarters of an acre, was christened the Lake vineyard. Diamond Creek has produced a Lake Cabernet Sauvignon only 17 times, when the vines yielded enough fruit and got sufficiently ripe; otherwise the grapes are blended into Gravelly Meadow.
The Diamond Creek wines were so distinguished that in 1997, the head of Maison Louis Roederer, Jean-Claude Rouzaud, selected it as one of the 30 greatest wines in the world for a celebration to mark his 30-year anniversary of running the company. He invited the Brounsteins to Paris for the party, and the families became friends.
Brounstein died in 2006 from complications of Parkinson’s Disease. Before she died in 2019, Boots began talking to current Roederer president Frederic Rouzaud about a possible acquisition. The deal, in 2020, whose terms were not disclosed, was the first real foray into Napa for the Champagne house, which has had a presence in California’s Anderson Valley since 1982 and purchased Sonoma County’s Merry Edwards Winery in 2019.
Wehmeier, prior to joining Diamond Creek, had always thought of it as “an old-school stalwart,” he said. But once he tasted extensively through the vintages, he saw the reality was more complicated. He noticed that the wines took an abrupt turn in the early aughts; the clearest way to see it was in the alcohol levels. Up until 2001, the wines had always hovered around 12.5%, but that year they rose to 13.5%. The next year, 14%. And there they stayed.
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Practically everyone in Napa was starting to make riper, bigger wines around that time. While Diamond Creek remained a darling of the sommelier class, who sought out its older vintages like trophies, “it had meanwhile joined the modern era in Napa Valley,” Wehmeier said, creeping up in oak influence and in ripeness.
“There was no doubt that these were significant wines, but there was a lack of distinction in the modern vintages,” said Carter. When Roederer came in, the imperative was to “unabashedly return the wines to what the French would call a place of freshness.”
For Wehmeier, that means picking the grapes earlier, implementing a lighter extraction during fermentation and reducing the percentage of new oak from 100% to two-thirds. Although his first vintage at Diamond Creek was mostly obliterated due to wildfire — he bottled only about 300 cases that year, from a corner of Volcanic Hill that had been picked before the Glass Fire — his 2021s taste like pure Diamond Creek. The Gravelly Meadow is floral and silky; the Volcanic Hill boldly aromatic, reminiscent of dusty strawberries; the Red Rock Terrace savory and electric.
Tastings at Diamond Creek come with a snack plate.
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As the winemaking and vineyard care have evolved, so has the pricing. Diamond Creek was always expensive: Brounstein boldly charged $7.50 for his initial release in 1972, at a time when most Napa wines, were a mere $5, as Boots later recalled in a Michelin Guide interview. The vintner even claimed to be the first in Napa to charge $100 a bottle, in the mid-’90s. The 2019s, the final vintage before Roederer’s acquisition, were $300, and as of the 2021 vintage the single-vineyard wines are $500 apiece. (A fourth wine, the 2021 Three Vineyard Blend, is $375.)
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One thing hasn’t changed: the labels. With a typeface inspired by “wanted” posters from the Old West, and an illustration that shows the vineyard in all its steep, rocky glory, the labels look straight out of the ’70s. Brounstein had hand-laid the letters for the printer himself. It might have been tempting for Roederer to give them a contemporary update, along the lines of what Lawrence Wine Estates did when it bought Heitz Cellar, another old-school Napa winery.
No chance, Wehmeier said: “The label is safe.”
Reach Esther Mobley: emobley@sfchronicle.com