I’m praying for rain in California
So the grapes can grow and they can make more wine
And I’m sitting in a honky in Chicago
With a broken heart and a woman on my mind.
I matched the man behind the bar for the jukebox
And the music takes me back to Tennessee
And they asked who’s the fool in the corner crying
I say a little ole wine drinker me.
– “Little Ole Wine Drinker Me” by Hank Mills and Dick Jenkins (as can only be sung by Dean Martin)
I rummaged through the far corners of my wine storage to remind myself of bottles deserving a turn in these articles. In the process, I unearthed a few gems I had somehow neglected to log in my wine-tracking database. It felt less like housekeeping and more like taking delivery of a brand-new wine shipment. In wine terms, that is the emotional equivalent of finding money in an old coat pocket. Lucky me!
These next wines are an incomparable trio, bottles most only read about, dream about, or perhaps pray over in especially devout vinous prayer. These wines, produced in tiny quantities, are only released in extremely limited allocations. They had to be included on my list.
Consider this article your warning: Each of these wines is extraordinary, but acquiring them may require choosing between buying a case or paying the mortgage. So, do the sensible thing and stick your glass out if someone is pouring.
83. Tusk Estates Cabernet Sauvignon 2013 – The connoisseur’s connoisseur wine.
If Tusk Estates is not yet on your radar, that is partly the point. The winery keeps a low profile, produces just 150 to 450 cases a year, and still managed to sell out its first four vintages while building a waiting list that moves with all the speed of a luxury elevator. I first tasted Tusk at a private tasting, went home, and immediately added my name to that list. Happily, allocations have finally started arriving.
Tusk’s inaugural vintage was 2008. It was created by Michael Uytengsu, Tim Martin, and Philippe Melka. The triumvirate’s goal was not merely to create a limited-production, über-cult wine in the mold of Screaming Eagle, Scarecrow, or Harlan. They wanted to build a luxury brand with the polish and mystique of Hermès or Loro Piana, which, to be fair, is a very Napa thing to attempt. That ambition may owe something to the fact that two of the founders come from branding and marketing backgrounds.
Tim Martin loves wine. He formerly worked for Robin Lail of the incomparable Lail Vineyards. He focuses on branding and marketing, having formed a company that has worked with wineries such as Melka Wines, Benediction, Constellation, Corliss Estate, and Curry Estate, amongst others.
Michael Uytengsu is a former investment banker and heir to an international food conglomerate that includes well-known brands such as Granny Goose Potato Chips, Sunshine Biscuits, and Keebler Foods, famous for the Keebler elves’ cookies. Which is appropriate, as they probably use elves’ magic to make Tusk.
Philippe Melka, perhaps the best known of the three, is a remarkable winemaker who spent much of his youth in Bordeaux. He has worked for Château Haut-Brion, Petrus, and Dominus Estate, amongst others. He was named as one of the top nine wine consultants in the world by no less than The Wine Advocate’s Robert Parker. Melka and his wife Cherie are co-proprietors of the brilliant Melka Wines.
Tusk is a Bordeaux-style wine that just happens to be produced in Napa. Its fruit is sourced from some of the finest vineyards in the valley, primarily Oakville and Pritchard Hill, amongst other Napa sub-appellations. The result is one of the most seductive wines to come out of Napa. Tusk also produces a second label, Tusk Estates L’Orange Red Bordeaux Blend, that other wineries would be proud to call their flagship wine.
I am going to say something that I have rarely said: The Tusk Cabernet Sauvignon 2013 is one of the most incredible wines I have had. This wine is captivating from the moment you hold the glass. The color is the darkest, inkiest purple. The nose reveals aromas that cascade from the sublime to the ridiculous. Delicate floral notes of fresh lavender coupled with blueberry, black cherry, charcoal, and graphite waft from the glass. Raspberries round out the bouquet.
The wine is opulent on the palate, unfolding in layers of caramel, cocoa, espresso, fig, and blackberry before moving into secondary notes of licorice, spice, tar, plum, menthol, leather, rosemary, and sous-bois. Velvety tannins glide effortlessly across the tongue. It is full-bodied and superbly balanced, with seamless acidity.
This is a complex yet unpretentious wine, and I would happily age it for another 10 to 20 years. That said, if this were the end of days, it would be one of the bottles I would open with a smile.
One final plea: Please, please, please decant this wine for at least two hours, and preferably three.
84. Hundred Acre Kayli Morgan Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon 2000 – “The things that make me different are the things that make me.”
Hundred Acre is the sort of Napa Cabernet that arrives with a reputation several steps ahead of the bottle. I first met it in Chicago around 2004, when Adrián, a sommelier friend who knew my penchant for Napa Cabs, placed a glass of the 2000 Kayli Morgan Vineyard in front of me. One sip in, I understood the fuss. This was one of the best Napa Cabs I had ever tasted. It was not a bruising, chest-thumping Cabernet. It was poised, nuanced, and beautifully controlled, proof that power and polish can, on rare occasions, share the same address. I wanted to know more. Graciously, Adrián told me about Hundred Acre and Jayson Woodbridge, its owner, whom I had heard of but knew little about at the time.
I acquired a bottle as soon as I got home. However, to make a long history short, a guest, who will never set foot in my home again, opened it in my absence. At least he left me about three ounces, which was generous only if we are using a very flexible definition of the word.
What makes Hundred Acre so compelling is the combination of obsession, scarcity, and results. What do you get when you mix fastidiousness with the mercurial? What do you get when the élevage is lavish, with vines that are tamed and shaped like bonsai trees until only a single cluster per shoot remains, and the berries are meticulously hand-harvested? What if a producer uses new French oak barrels to age his wines for at least 24 months, and sometimes as long as 42 months? What if the bottle has a 24-karat gold ring at the opening and the cork is sealed with beeswax from the owner’s hometown in Canada? What if the producer limits production to no more than 250 cases? Lastly, what do you get if the wine is made by Philippe Melka, the nonpareil consulting winemaker? You get the remarkable Hundred Acre, a six-year waiting list, and a wine which has received more 100-point scores than any other wine in Napa in the past 20 years.
Hundred Acre wine itself is all seriousness, but it takes its whimsical name as a nod to A. A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood, where the Winnie-the-Pooh stories take place. Canadian Founder Jayson Woodbridge came to Napa from investment banking and set out to craft a wine that would stand with the region’s best or not stand at all. That ambition can read as audacious, eccentric, or both—probably both, but it is hard to argue with the outcome. Hundred Acre has collected an astonishing run of perfect scores and has built the kind of following that makes securing an allocation feel slightly less likely than being invited to Buckingham Palace for a casual midweek lunch.
Woodbridge’s wife, Helen Mawson, a winemaker in her own right, became involved in the Napa wine industry in 1998, working with Joseph Phelps, Miner Family, and Philippe Melka. Woodbridge had an epiphany: He determined that he wanted his own vineyard and to create not just wines, but superior wines. His motto is, “Stand amongst the very best or not at all.”
The inaugural 2000 vintage came from the original Kayli Morgan site, now named Morgan’s Way, after Woodbridge’s daughter. It is a nine-acre estate off Silverado Trail near the base of Howell Mountain in eastern Napa Valley, just down the slope from Araujo Estate’s Eisele Vineyard. Woodbridge removed the Sauvignon Blanc vines and replanted the site with Cabernet Sauvignon.
The 2000 vintage was Hundred Acre’s first release, and it announced itself with uncommon confidence, priced alongside Napa’s established elite from the start. That was cheeky then. It looks more like foresight now.
Jayson Woodbridge has long been a polarizing figure in Napa, part perfectionist, part provocateur, and entirely uninterested in blending into the local wallpaper. He is either hated or not hated so much, depending on whom you ask in Napa. He has been in fights with Napa’s establishment, neighbors, the California Department of Alcohol and Beverage Control Board, and the Napa Valley Planning Commission, to name a few. The Napa County District Attorney’s office even filed a criminal complaint against him. He is also equal parts irreverent and single-minded. His wife, Helen Mawson, once said of him, “He’s just the right side of crazy,” which may be the most efficient explanation of Hundred Acre’s style, ambition, and refusal to do anything quietly.
For all the rhetoric about craftsmanship over profit, the market has rendered its own verdict. Hundred Acre sits firmly in Napa’s luxury stratosphere, with demand, scores, and scarcity reinforcing its legend vintage after vintage. As a result, Woodbridge’s success has become its own reward.
From the beginning, Hundred Acre was conceived as a single-vineyard, uncompromising Cabernet program where everything would be handcrafted, tightly controlled, and unapologetically ambitious. That philosophy is now so firmly embedded in the brand that even its confidence has become part of the label’s terroir. Woodbridge says his focus is on making the best wine, not on making a profit. Notwithstanding that claim, Hundred Acre’s revenue is more than $60 million across three brands and six vineyards. Revenue increased more than 200% from 2021 to 2023. I wonder what would happen if he decided to focus on making a profit?
Woodbridge set the price for Hundred Acre’s inaugural 2000 vintage, released in 2003, at $150.00. This was a price comparable to established cult wines such as Colgin at the time. Since that first vintage, he has lived up to the cheek of his motto. It is Woodbridge’s pursuit of perfection that makes this single vineyard, 100% Cabernet Sauvignon the wine that it is. Everything is handcrafted and overseen by Woodbridge, who has since taken over as winemaker.
Interestingly, Woodbridge is a self-taught winemaker, having never gone to winemaking school. He may be self-taught, but the results have been emphatic. He has stayed true to his vision and has been amply rewarded. The wines have amassed a formidable tally of 42 100-point scores since the winery’s inception. Allocations remain scarce enough that joining the mailing list feels more like filing a long-term hope than placing an order. Getting an allocation can mean waiting as long as five years. Good luck! Only 3,000 clients worldwide receive allocations.
Woodbridge followed up his Hundred Acre winery in St. Helena, California, by establishing another Hundred Acre project in Australia’s Barossa Valley, where he makes Ancient Way Vineyard Summer’s Blocks Shiraz. His specialty is single-vineyard, highly limited wines.
The California Hundred Acre is released only to the winery’s mailing list. Woodbridge also makes a fortified dessert wine, a barrel-fermented Sauvignon Blanc, and Fortunate Son. He was the mind behind Cherry Pie, Cherry Tart Pinot Noir, and Layer Cake wines, which he sold in 2017.
One of Woodbridge’s latest ventures is a $20.00 Cabernet Sauvignon from Paso Robles, which I tried for the first time with my friends Davin and Theresa several months ago. This wine has a heavily tattooed bad girl on the label, inspired by James Joyce’s 1922 book Ulysses. The wine has a double entendre as its name, “If You See Kay.”
The 2000 Hundred Acre Kayli Morgan Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon is emphatically not the budget side of the portfolio. In the glass, it shows a deep purple-ruby color and opens with a floral lift, crème de cassis, dark cherry, licorice, sous-bois, and café au lait. On the palate, it is rich without heaviness, delivering kirsch, dark chocolate, spice, and blackberry in layered waves, all wrapped in smooth tannins, measured acidity, and a long, polished finish. This is a Cabernet of precision as much as opulence, and that balance is what makes it unforgettable.
A. A. Milne wrote, “The things that make me different are the things that make me.” In Hundred Acre’s case, that difference is exactly the point. It is exacting, extravagant, and just self-aware enough to know that performance is part of pleasure.
85. Scarecrow 2005 – Follow the yellow brick road wherever it takes you to try this wine.
I was sitting at the bar in a restaurant about 15 years ago, enjoying a delightful glass of wine. It had been one of those days determined to prove the concept of fatigue. Then Frank, an attorney whom I had not seen in years, walked in, exchanged the sort of nod that suggests regular-customer status. The bartender left, shortly returning and promptly handing Frank a bottle of Scarecrow 2005. I had read about the wine but never tasted it. Suddenly, I found my own perfectly good glass of wine that I was enjoying moments earlier looking a little less triumphant.
The bottle was opened, and a ribbon of dark purple liquid cascaded into Frank’s glass. He tasted it, nodded once, and the bartender filled the glass. I had read about Scarecrow, but I had never tasted it.
Scarecrow is one of those mythic Napa wines whose backstory arrives wearing its own spotlight. Whether every detail of the story I am going to share has been polished by time hardly matters. As Dorothy M. Johnson wrote in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.” In this case, the legend is worth keeping.
So here it is: The roots of Scarecrow run through Inglenook, one of Napa Valley’s foundational estates. Founded in 1879 by Gustav Niebaum in Rutherford, Inglenook became one of the region’s early standard-bearers before Prohibition shut the doors and history did what history tends to do: complicate everything. The winery remained shuttered until Prohibition was repealed in 1933.
The key figure here is John Daniel Jr., Niebaum’s great-nephew, Inglenook’s exacting steward and one of Napa’s great perfectionists. Daniel is one of the most storied names in Napa Valley’s history. In the 1940s, he persuaded neighboring landowner J. J. Cohn to plant 80 acres of Cabernet Sauvignon in Rutherford, with the understanding that Daniel would have access to the fruit.
Cohn was the first head of production at MGM Studios and had a hand in producing films such as Mutiny on the Bounty and Ben-Hur. He also produced his favorite, the 1939 classic The Wizard of Oz, which is how this story eventually acquires both a vineyard and a yellow brick road.
Daniel’s standards were legendary, even if the market at the time was less interested in nuance than volume. Inglenook received numerous awards and accolades. Daniel eventually sold Inglenook in 1964, and the estate drifted far from its former glory for a period. Fortunately, the vineyard story did not end there. Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather trilogy, rescued Inglenook and sought to return it to its former glory. But that story is for another day.
The next chapter of this story arrived in 1996 when Bret Lopez, one of Cohn’s grandsons, took over the vineyard. He was determined to produce wine, not merely grow fruit. He hired the nonpareil Celia Welch as consulting winemaker and named the project Scarecrow in tribute to his grandfather’s affection for The Wizard of Oz. The initial vintage was 2003, and Scarecrow quickly joined the highest tier of Napa cult Cabernet, compared to Screaming Eagle and Harlan.
Part of the wine’s mystique is rooted, literally, in the vineyard itself. Scarecrow is made from some of the oldest Cabernet Sauvignon vines in North America, planted in 1945 by John Daniel Jr. on original rootstock. Many growers replanted their vineyards with phylloxera-resistant rootstock, but Daniel took a chance and kept the original vines. That alone would make the site notable. The fact that fruit from this vineyard has also supplied names such as Opus One, Phelps Insignia, Mondavi Reserve, and Inglenook only add to the aura.
Scarecrow 2005 is plush and was aged in new French oak for the first year. The vintner then blended and aged the wine for an additional nine months. This gives the palate the most delightful taste of oak. The acidity is restrained, the tannins refined, and everything leads to a pleasurable finish.
Scarecrow makes a second label, M. Étain. It is Cabernet Sauvignon-dominant, blended with Malbec, Petit Verdot, and Merlot, and is an exceptional wine. The winery also produces another bottling, Toto’s Opium Dream, which I only recently learned about.
Toto’s Opium Dream is released only in select vintages that the winemaker considers worthy. It cheerfully leans into theater, even by cult-wine standards. The last Toto’s Opium Dream was the 2016 vintage. Each bottle is hand-numbered and sold at the Napa Valley Harvest STOMP Auction. Bottle No. 001 of the 200-bottle, 750 ml allotment sold for $50,000. The balance of the allotment was sold to Scarecrow’s members. Each bottle came in a leather-clad, triple-hinged box with an inlaid mother-of-pearl poppy on the top. Sadly, I have not tried Toto’s Opium Dream, partly because allocations are elusive and, more importantly, because its price tag remains under active negotiation with my better judgment.
The bartender opened the bottle, and a ribbon of dark purple liquid cascaded into Frank’s glass. He tasted it, nodded once, and the bartender filled the glass. I could smell the balanced fruits even from a distance.
I drained my glass, and Frank replaced it with my first taste of Scarecrow. My wine envy was justified. The wine was nuanced, announcing itself with confidence, though nothing as gauche as shouting. Scarecrow is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, with an inky, dark ruby-purple color. The nose had pungent aromas of liqueur-like crème de cassis, blackberry, violet, and dark 90% chocolate. The wine was still tight and unfurling in the glass, having been opened only a short time, but even early on, it was layered. Mouth-watering strata of blackberry, blueberry, and chocolate-covered dark cherry cascaded over the palate. It carried its oak with elegance, its tannins with refinement, and the finish had the sort of calm authority that reminds you that a great Napa Cabernet is not merely about power but also about poise.
The second glass revealed even more. Density and sweetness emerged from the glass as it opened up. The wine was rich, balanced, and layered with flavors, yet restrained. Sous-bois, lavender, rose water, and vanilla enveloped the ever-present fruit.
I have tasted few Napa wines that are equal to Scarecrow 2005. It is everything you could hope for in a great Napa Cabernet: depth, restraint, beauty, and presence, all delivered with the kind of effortless confidence that makes comparison feel unnecessary. Some bottles live up to the dream. This one moved in, redecorated, and made itself entirely at home.
Dorothy sings in The Wizard of Oz, “Somewhere over the rainbow, skies are blue, and the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true.”
Forget the Land of Oz. Dorothy was describing a bottle of Scarecrow 2005.
Cheers!
