Red Cap Vineyards

Tom Altemus came from Philadelphia and went to work for IBM after college. Business trips brought him to Napa and to good wine. In 1991 he became a chef, graduating with honours from the California Culinary Academy, and cooked alongside Michel Richard and Bradley Ogden before landing at Brava Terrace in St. Helena, cooking for the valley’s vintners. That is where he met Zuidema. He was thirty-three when he and Desiree bought the Howell Mountain land.

They planted the vineyard on Robert Craig’s advice and sold much of the fruit to other Napa wineries, the Davies family among them, keeping under a thousand cases a year for Red Cap. The swinging boy on the label, drawn by the scratchboard artist Roger Xavier, stands for their three children and, in the family’s words, “the spirit of wonder and fun that we all try to embody on a daily basis.” Tom paints too, and has won prizes for it. The vineyard, he told the Napa Wine Project, was his best job to date.

The vineyard lies on a rolling plateau near the top of the mountain. The soil is Aiken loam, deep, red and peppered with fractured volcanic rock, its iron oxidised by long exposure; it is poor in nutrients, so Tom added a little organic matter by each vine every year. The Cabernet is clones 4, 7 and 169 on 101-14 rootstock, spaced five feet by seven, and yields about two tons an acre. The winery describes the grapes as organically grown and hand farmed; the Davies family’s notes say the Altemus family farmed it biodynamically.

Being above the fog line is what makes Howell Mountain different. When the valley floor is socked in, the mornings up here are sunny; the Davies notes add that the days are cooler and the nights warmer than below, which helps the grapes keep their acidity. Smaller berries give more skin to juice, deeper colour and firmer tannin. At harvest the Altemuses picked only what was ripe, sometimes a few rows at a time, so that harvest on six acres could stretch over a month. The berries were fermented whole, on their own yeasts, cool and slow, with punch-downs by hand.

This is hillside Napa Valley at its best.

The Napa Wine Project

The 2019 Cabernet in our book is the estate wine in its classic form: all Cabernet Sauvignon, from mild October days that were sunny by day and cool at night, thirty-two months in French oak, seventy per cent new, 275 cases. It is a big wine, at fifteen per cent alcohol, with the balance to carry it. The Napa Wine Project found it “balanced, with plenty of depth and layers,” gravelly tannins and “plenty of life ahead of it.” Decant it now or give it ten years.

The Sauvignon Blanc is bought in, from the McGaw vineyard in Rutherford and the Alko Ranch in Pope Valley, on the eastern side of Howell Mountain, warm by day and cool morning and evening. It is fermented mostly in steel. Most vintages carry a little Sémillon (sixteen per cent in 2022, by the Napa Wine Project’s account), which, the winery says, “adds texture and quiet depth.” Since 2023 it has been called the Host. Pour it with oysters, goat cheese or nothing at all.

Early in 2022 the vintner Chris Klein was having lunch with Zuidema, who told him Tom was retiring and selling the brand. Klein called him. Later that year, with an investor, he bought Red Cap and its stock of wine; the Altemus family kept the land. Klein was born in Napa and raised in St. Helena. His parents founded Allora Vineyards, where Zuidema was the winemaker and where Klein learned the trade, and he calls his own career a “Rudyism.”

His partner is Michael Nguyen, who met Tom in 2010 at a Howell Mountain tasting in San Francisco, offered to help, was handed a rake, and ended up building the brand’s following. He became a partner in 2024. The winery now names Mike Dunn as winemaker, whose family settled on Howell Mountain in 1978 and built Dunn Vineyards, with Zuidema as consultant.