Brilliant Mistake

They noticed each other at the salon for months and barely spoke; baseball got them talking. The Napa trips came later, and with them the winemakers. Thomas Rivers Brown was one, Juan Mercado another, and the Reinerts were struck by how freely people in the valley talked about what had gone right for them and what had not. A lunch with Mercado at Bottega in Yountville ran past three hours. His advice, as The Napa Wine Project recorded it, was plain: choose a name nobody else has, stay very small at the start, make the grape Napa is known for, and keep out outside investors.

They followed most of it. The first wine, 2013, was a Cabernet from the Taylor Family Vineyard in the Stags Leap District, made by Rebekah Wineburg before she left to run the cellar at Quintessa. A Sauvignon Blanc came in 2016, then the single-vineyard Georges III, then a barrel selection called The Poet & The Muse, about fifty-five cases aged some thirty months in French oak. In 2018 two collectors, Steve Greenbaum and Doc Cohen, came in as partners, and in 2026 Bronco Wine Company took on national distribution of the Napa Valley Cabernet, with Koschitzky staying on as winemaker. The project has grown, slowly, the way Mercado told them to grow it.

Koschitzky trained as a mechanical engineer in Israel and switched to wine in his mid-twenties, in 2004. In 2010 he and his wife decided to try America for a year or two. He applied for cellar jobs in Napa and was offered an internship at Screaming Eagle under its new winemaker, Nick Gislason. He had not heard of the place; his older brother looked it up. His first harvest there was 2011, the year the new winery was finished, and he remembers twenty-hour days for five months.

They did not go back to Israel. Cameron Vawter at Dana Estate offered him work and sent him to meet Philippe Melka; Melka hired him in 2014, and Koschitzky rose to Director of Winemaking and then partner at Atelier Melka. He consults in Australia, Chile and Israel as well. The Reinerts wanted a winemaker who would teach them in the vineyard and the cellar and let them take part, and their own words for what they asked of him are “nothing added, nothing interfered with.” Inside Winemaking magazine, quoted on the label’s site, put his career this way: he had “accumulated more winemaking experience in ten years than many enologists would in an entire career.”

Beckstoffer Vineyard Georges III lies in east Rutherford, between Conn Creek Road and the Silverado Trail, on valley-floor gravel and alluvium. Part of it was planted in 1895 by the Rutherford family. Georges de Latour of Beaulieu bought the land in 1928 and called it Beaulieu Vineyard No. 3; Andy Beckstoffer bought it in 1988 and renamed it for its old number. It is Beckstoffer’s largest Napa holding, divided into twenty-nine blocks, and much of it is protected from development by a conservation easement. Brilliant Mistake’s comes from old vines in what the label calls a historic section of the vineyard, and the wine shows the site’s signature: dark currant and graphite, and what the winery calls “that legendary rutherford dust.”

The Napa Valley Cabernet is a blend of vineyards that has moved with the vintages: Rutherford and Stags Leap in 2014, Rutherford and St. Helena in 2018 and 2019, Rutherford and Oakville in 2021 and 2022. All of it is valley-floor fruit from the middle of the appellation, and in most years it is Cabernet Sauvignon alone. The 2021 vintage gave small yields of concentrated fruit; the winery’s own note on it mentions longer hang times, thinner canopies, and a little more new French oak than before.

A total show-stopper that is remarkably elegant and will live on for decades to come.

Owen Bargreen, on the 2021 Georges III

Big Napa Cabernet is easy to make and hard to make well, and the test is time. When The Napa Wine Project opened the 2013, the first wine the Reinerts ever made, twelve years after the vintage, it found the colour still dark, the fruit still primary and the acidity still fresh: “like a time capsule, holding fresh, steady and youthful as the years tick by.” That is the case for these wines. The Cabernets are full-bodied and generous young, with a rock-solid frame of tannin under the blue-black fruit, and they are made to be put away.

The Sauvignon Blanc shows the other side of the house. It is fermented entirely in barrel and stirred on its lees often, which gives it weight and a creamy texture without dulling the Meyer lemon and grapefruit. Bargreen gave the 2022 95 points and expected it to keep for a decade; the 2018 was on the International Wine Report’s list of top 100 wines of 2019. Open it with shellfish. Open the Cabernet in ten years.