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TECHNICAL REVIEW WINEMAKING Historic Winery's Modern Center How Beaulieu Vineyard built a reserve winery to bring its Georges de Latour Cabernet into the modern era By Andrew Adams ANDREW ADAMS Highlights The winery is equipped with tanks, oak vats, T he wines of Napa Valley are enjoyed by celebrities and billionaires and served at the world's best restaurants. But few wineries can boast about their wines having graced the tables of Winston Churchill, Gen. Douglas MacArthur or Queen Elizabeth II. Such is the unique place of Beaulieu Vineyard, or BV, in the history of Napa and American wine. The winery, one of the oldest in Napa Valley, operated through Prohibition and has endured through a few corporate takeovers and mergers. While the winery has been an enduring presence in the heart of Napa Valley, about eight years ago the winemakers there decided they needed to modernize their approach to keep pace with winemaking technology and changing tastes. With better equipment and a focused approach, they aimed to improve BV's Georges de Latour reserve wine while maintaining its legacy. 32 W in es & V i ne s AP R I L 2 013 • eaulieu Vineyard built a $3.7 million B winery-within-a-winery to improve its Georges de Latour reserve wine program. • early half of all the wine made in the N reserve winery is fermented in barrel. The portion in tanks has a computer-controlled pump-over system. • computer-controlled pump-over system A easily allows for multiple pump overs per day. The Georges de Latour, which the winery sells for $125, has represented BV's best wines since its inaugural vintage of 1936. To preserve that tradition, the winery invested $3.7 million to build a modern winery at the main Rutherford complex. Need to modernize, alter style Joel Aiken joined BV in 1982 as a winemaker. After about 25 years on the job he helped plan the reserve winery but left his full-time role in 2009 to establish his own brand, Aiken Wines. He stayed on through the 2010 vintage as a consultant. a concrete fermentor and hundreds of barrels. Aiken said the idea for a reserve or small-lot winery first arose in the mid1990s, but an ownership change scuttled those early plans. About a decade later, he revised the idea of updating the winemaking for Georges de Latour. Aiken said he wanted the equipment to express the prized fruit flavors of the wine while softening the tannins so consumers could enjoy it sooner. "Thirty years ago we'd bottle up Georges de Latour and tell people, 'Don't drink it for 10 years,'" Aiken said. Top management gave the green light (Diageo came to own the winery after the Guinness and Grand Metropolitan merger in 1997), and Aiken and Jeffrey Stambor began experimenting. Stambor, the current director of winemaking, originally joined BV as a viticulturist in 1989. "I think it was great timing because there were so many techniques that had changed," Aiken said, referring to temperature management, extended maceration and fermenting red wine in barrel.