Bella Oaks Estate

Barney Rhodes was a dermatologist who ended up running Kaiser Permanente; Belle cooked, taught and entertained. They first came to Napa after the war and in 1954 bought forty-four acres in Oakville, which they later sold to Tom and Martha May. In 1959 they bought the Rutherford land that became Bella Oaks and planted it entirely to Cabernet Sauvignon. Joe Heitz took the grapes and put the vineyard’s name on the label, as he did for the Mays.

The Rhodes were at the centre of the valley’s early food and wine life. Barney was the founding president of the Napa Valley Wine Library Association in 1963; Belle helped start the Napa Valley Cooking Classes in 1972; their house on the vineyard had a cellar of more than ten thousand bottles and a long list of guests who cooked in its kitchen, Julia Child among them. The tasting room at the Culinary Institute of America at Greystone carries their names. Belle died in 2007 and Barney in 2008, the year after the last Heitz Bella Oaks.

The vineyard passed briefly to the Gargiulo family before Suzanne Deal Booth bought it. From 2011 to 2015, while the new plantings grew up, the fruit went to her neighbours the Staglins, who bottled it as Booth Bella Oaks.

Bella Oaks sits on the Rutherford Bench, the gentle slope between the valley floor and the Mayacamas Mountains where Napa first learned that one patch of ground could taste different from the next. The neighbours are Staglin, Scarecrow and Morisoli. The soils are alluvial: dark gravel and clay loams washed down from the mountains, over old volcanic rock, deep enough to feed a vine and free-draining enough to keep it honest. Frank Prial wrote about the place in The New York Times in 1991, and his line is still the estate’s favourite.

Rutherford is the middle of the valley in every sense. The floor is wide and sunny, the bay breezes reach it in the afternoon, and the alluvial fans coming off the Mayacamas drain well. André Tchelistcheff called the result Rutherford dust, the fine, cocoa-dry tannin the best wines of the bench share. The Proprietary Red has it; the Napa Wine Project found gravelly, chalky tannins in the 2023.

David Abreu, who farms for many of Napa’s most sought-after Cabernets, began the replanting in 2010 and 2011. He changed the row orientation, kept the vineyard mostly Cabernet Sauvignon and added small sections of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot. The estate now runs to about forty-four acres, roughly half of it planted, including nineteen adjoining acres of the old Fahrig Ranch. The vineyard was certified organic by CCOF in 2019 and is farmed biodynamically, with some two hundred olive trees and a good deal of art among the vines.

There is little question that the soils here are special.

Frank J. Prial, The New York Times, 1991

Nigel Kinsman has made every vintage since 2017. He and his wife Shae, now the general manager, had bought a bottle of 1976 Heitz Bella Oaks shortly before Suzanne Deal Booth asked him to take on the winemaking. Michel Rolland, the Bordeaux consultant, makes the final assemblage with him. The wine is now made at Wheeler Farms in St. Helena, which Booth bought from the Araujo family in 2024.

Production is about a thousand cases a year, nearly all of it the two reds. The Proprietary Red in our 2019 is 93 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 7 percent Cabernet Franc, co-fermented, with twenty-one months in 70 percent new French oak; 444 cases were made. Le Génie 2022 is all Cabernet from the younger estate vines, with twenty-two months in 68 percent new oak. The estate says plainly that Le Génie does not demand cellaring, which is a rare thing for a Napa winery to admit about anything. The Red does want time, and repays it.

Le Génie shares its name with the Max Ernst bronze that stands on the estate, Le Génie de la Bastille. The label carries the labyrinth set under a ring of old olive trees, laid in stones from Dublin, Boston and Montana and drawn from the medieval pattern at Chartres.

There is also, from 2024, a first white: Sauvignon Blanc and Sauvignon Musqué from a single acre of the estate.

In 2023 the estate marked fifty years since the first plantings with a dinner in New York, opening bottles back to 1976; the people who were there remarked on how well the old Heitz wines had held. Decanter published a fifteen-vintage retrospective the same year. Wine Spectator listed Bella Oaks among its wineries to watch in 2021, and the line the estate itself quotes is Antonio Galloni’s.

Suzanne Deal Booth is an art historian and conservator by training, and the vineyard is run as a preservation project as much as a business: twelve site-specific works by artists from Yayoi Kusama to Robert Irwin stand among the vines, and in 2025 she gave ten million dollars to the World Monuments Fund for an institute of heritage preservation. That instinct suits an old vineyard. She has kept the name, rebuilt the vines, and let the wine take its time.

Our advice is the same as for any great Rutherford site. Open Le Génie now. Put the Proprietary Red away and wait.

A majestic and totally riveting wine.

Antonio Galloni