This fall, when the fruit comes off Three Palms Vineyard, Renée Ary and her winemaking team will do something so routine at Duckhorn that nobody thinks to question it. They will treat the Merlot gently, raise it in fine French oak, and bottle it on its own, under its own name.
In 1978, that decision started an argument. And Duckhorn nearly went the other way.
The first vintage was resting in barrel when Tom Rinaldi, the young winemaker who had rolled up to the winery on a motorcycle just months earlier, burst into Dan and Margaret’s kitchen with an idea. He had blended the Cabernet and the Merlot in the lab, and the result was gorgeous. Make one wine, he urged. It was so good it didn’t need a name.
Dan and Margaret overruled him.
They would make the Cabernet, Dan reasoned, because Napa expected one. But the Merlot had to stand on its own. A trip through Pomerol and Saint-Émilion had convinced him that the grape Napa treated as a blending partner could carry a wine by itself, if anyone gave it the chance.
So they split the vintage, and then doubled down. They put the vineyard on the label, honoring their friends the Uptons and the sun-soaked patch of Calistoga rockpile called Three Palms. And they priced the Merlot at $12, right alongside Napa’s serious Cabernets. If the wine was going to make a statement, it had to stand where the statement would be heard.
When the first bottles were ready, eight or ten trade people came through: local restaurateurs, shop owners, and a few distributors who had been called or heard something was happening at the little winery on Lodi Lane.
As Dan remembered it, “They tasted the wine, and it just took off.”
The wine Tom wanted to blend away became Three Palms Vineyard Merlot, the wine built the house. In 2017, the 2014 vintage was named Wine Spectator’s Wine of the Year, one of the first Merlots to earn the distinction.
Which is why nobody in the cellar argues about it anymore. The decision made in a kitchen in 1978 is remade every vintage, quietly and as a matter of course. What was once Duckhorn’s boldest choice has been proven by time so completely that it now passes for tradition.
