Neyers Vineyards sits in the heart of the Napa Valley but Ehren's experience as a winemaker in France and Bruce's experience with French wine importer Kermit Lynch have had an undeniable influence on our work. Many French wine producers farm organically, make their wines naturally without use of cultured yeast or laboratory designed malo-lactic starters, and bottle their wines without fining or filtration. We like their results and utilize many of their ideas. The production of outstanding wine is invariably accompanied by some degree of risk.
Our barrels are made in France, to our specifications, from wood that we buy at auction and air dry for three years, a year longer than normal. All of our grapes are picked by hand, into half-ton bins, then laboriously hand sorted at the winery. Grapes that require a drive of more than thirty minutes to our winery are delivered in refrigerated trucks.
Our Merlot comes entirely from our Conn Valley ranch, and is grown organically in the Bordeaux inspired vineyards surrounding our home. The combination of cordon-pruned vertical-trellis system on a tightly spaced planting grid serves to keep yields low and quality high. The vineyard is planted to a traditional mix of Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Cabernet Sauvignon. We harvest low yields at optimum ripeness, then ferment for 30 days or more to insure maximum extraction of color and flavor, which invariably gives us greater complexity.
Our Chardonnay grapes are not crushed, but slowly whole-cluster pressed. The juice is racked directly into barrel, then fermented naturally with indigenous wild yeast. The process is time consuming and expensive, but it produces a level of richness and complexity not found in Chardonnay produced otherwise.
While Syrah is less than 10% of our annual production, the equipment to produce
it takes up 50% of the cellar space at our winery. We cold soak the must for
up to a week, and make no sulfur-dioxide addition at harvest. Fermentation
in custom-designed open-top tanks enables us to vary the level of stem retention
for each lot of wine, and to manually Īpunch-down' the cap, following the time-honored
Rhone Valley tradition.
All three of our Zinfandel bottlings are from low-yielding, old vine sources.
The Pato Ranch in Oakley was planted in 1896 and includes some of the last
remaining own-rooted Zinfandel vines in California. The Tofanelli Vineyard
in Calistoga has a long and colorful history in the area and has historically
produced some of this variety's most respected wines. The Chiles Valley (known
as the High Valley until prohibition) vineyards of Jay and Pam Heminway are
planted at an elevation of over 1800 feet, among the highest elevation vineyards
in the Napa Valley. These old, dry-farmed vines rarely yield a crop of more
than a ton or so per acre, and the fruit produces a bright, enormously attractive
example of the varietal.
All of our wines are made with an eye for quality, and a deep-seated passion for excellence. They are aged with as little intervention as possible, and in most years we bottle our wines with neither fining nor filtration, using our custom designed, state of the art mobile bottling line. No expense has been spared in our grape growing, winemaking practices, or processing equipment, yet customers repeatedly tell us that our wines represent great value in today's highly competitive wine market. We hope you agree.
