Dyer Vineyard

After starting with trips to Glen Ellen to “visit Bill’s sister” (i.e., scope out Sonoma wineries), Bill landed a job with a local vintner near Santa Cruz. Dawnine, a biology major, soon joined him there working part-time. In short order they were in Napa picking grapes. After harvest, Bill took some entry-level cellar work as a prelude to attaining a UC-Davis degree, and Dawnine scored a job at the newly founded Chandon in Yountville (the American subsidiary of French-owned Moët & Chandon). It was a 25-year run for her, first under the tutelage of the late Champenois Edmund Maudière, and later as the company’s vice president and principal winemaker. A few towns up valley, Ric Forman hired Bill as the cellar master at Sterling, where in 1976 Bill took the helm for what would turn out to be 20 years.

It was a heady time for flagship wineries like Sterling and Chandon. One year the couple came across a report publishing the total gallons that had been produced in Napa, “and we realized that between the two of us, we made 15% of all the wine in the valley that vintage!”

After twenty-some years working for others, they felt the urge to lay bricks of their own.  A real-estate agent led them to #1501 Diamond Mountain Road. They returned again and again, walking the lot at various hours of the day. By the time they took the plunge, they’d decided that building a home could wait: instead of breaking ground on a house, a 2-acre planting area below the home site would take precedence. 

“It was an intellectual exercise to make wines we wanted to make, and to figure out what a vineyard wanted to be,” Dawnine muses. 

Bill knew Diamond Mountain well, having developed Sterling’s single-vineyard wines of the 1980s. And of course just across the street, through a curtain of towering black oaks, Al and Boots Brounstein of Diamond Creek Vineyards had produced decades’ worth of fascinating results from a property modeled out by soil type, block-by-block. Bill and Dawnine tackled their parcel with the same meticulous sensibility—unearthing some surprises along the way.

In 1993 the tractor turned the topsoil with ease, but met much more resistance the further it dug. The hillside bench the Dyers had picked was hiding Rhyolite, a volcanic red rock, in the substratum. “There were boulders the size of Volkswagens,” Bills recalls. Standing in the vineyard today, he scoops a handful of dirt and lets the fine, ashy gray topsoil sift through his fingers. “It’s complicated,” he says of the site, “but if anything, it’s like DCV’s Gravelly Meadow on top of Red Rock Terraces.”

And beyond the geological hodgepodge of red volcanic earth and gravel, believed to be the remnants of an ancient landslide, there was another dimension of complexity.

“When we first got here”, says Bill, reflecting on the generation that started in the 1970s, “we all thought the deeper you went up valley, the warmer it got.  But then we all got thermometers in our cars and we saw that that wasn’t true.” It turned out that up or down valley, a different microclimate could be felt on either side of every mountain road.

Dyer had its own particular weather. At 600 to 800 feet elevation, on a steep north-to-east-facing bench, it’s nowhere near as hot as Calistoga, the nearest town, on the valley floor. Daytime temps can hit 90 degrees during the growing season, which pushes ripening. But every afternoon, like clockwork, cool Pacific winds blow down the valley’s north end and whip the benchlands, where twisted oaks branches rustle ferociously in the golden hours before the mercury drops, allowing developing grapes clusters to hold on to acidity. The combination held the promise of a balance and liveliness that had become hard to find (or just fallen out of fashion) amid the 1990s rush toward opulence and unctuosity.  

This climatic exposure, combined with Dyer’s particular slope, orientation and the mountain’s geology, does not come without challenges in the cellar. Notoriously massive grape tannins materialize from vines that plunge deep only to yield small, thick-skinned berries.

Over the decades, the Dyers have learned that tannin management must be a slow and gentle protocol. They start by cold-soaking grapes for three to five days before fermentation, aiming to begin the extraction of aroma and soft skin tannin before pumping over and punching down on a cap that contains harder but more complex seed tannin. After fermentation, a basket press leaks out every last drop from the must—and if enough phenolic extract and concentration are present in the free-run juice, the pressed juice is left out of production entirely.

Dyer Estate Cabernet’s common thread, which always includes a generous component of Cabernet Franc, is a resiny savoriness punctuated by a subtle yet beguiling perfume of fresh pencil shavings. “This is the volcanic soil at work,” Dawnine maintains.

As the wine unfurls in the glass—or decanter—blue to black fruits emerge alongside mint, as well as youthful cherries depending on the vintage. An expansive midpalate marks the wines in their youth, while maturation imparts a silky finish. But with alcohol levels that rarely creep above 14.5%, the wines are finely delineated and fresh even in the ripest years.

Fifty-plus years after they set out on this journey, the Dyers have come fully into their own along with their precious 2.3-acre parcel. A deep stream uphill supplies the well from which Bill and Dawnine watered each vine a modest six gallons once per growing season through 2012. But as drought conditions intensified, fanning fears of depleting reserves, the Dyers ceased watering altogether in 2013. The Cabernet vines didn’t skip a beat. More than 25 years after its original planting, Dyer is a mature vineyard in full stride.