Most of the wines in The Black List are named for a place.
Stagecoach. Monte Rosso. Aldo’s. Heminway is different. Heminway is a person.
His name was Jay Heminway, and in 1969 he did something that would seem almost unthinkable today. He was a sculpting teacher in Berkeley. He bought a piece of raw mountain in the Vaca range on the eastern edge of Napa County. And he started planting Zinfandel on it.
Not because it was a smart real estate move. Not because Napa was hot. Napa wasn’t hot in 1970s. It was rural. It was quiet. It was still the kind of place where a Berkeley professor could disappear into the hills and slowly, deliberately, carve out a life farming.
That’s what he did. Terrace by terrace. He worked that hillside for more than five decades, building what’s now called Green & Red Vineyard, a series of stepped plantings that climb to two thousand feet, tucked between the southern edge of Howell Mountain and the northern edge of Pritchard Hill. Two of the most respected mountain AVAs in Napa sit on either side of him, and Green & Red still stands apart from both.
Jay passed away a few years ago. His daughter Tobin and her husband Ray steward the vineyard now, and they’re carrying that work forward with the same care that made it worth naming a wine after in the first place.
The wine we make from his mountain is called Heminway because we couldn’t imagine calling it anything else.
The sculptor’s mountain
There’s a detail in Jay’s biography that most tech sheets skip over but that I think is the whole story: he was a sculptor by training.
He didn’t come to Green & Red as a viticulturist. He came as an artist. He looked at a rough, forested piece of mountain and saw form in it. Sculptors work by removing material to reveal what’s already there. That’s exactly what Jay did to the hillside. He cut terraces into ground that didn’t want to be terraced. He composed a vineyard the way a sculptor composes anything, with an eye for proportion, exposure, and shape.
There’s a version of Napa that would have laughed at what Jay was doing in 1969. Terraced Zinfandel at two thousand feet on the wrong side of the valley? Away from the roads, away from the traffic, away from the money? Fifty-plus years later, that version of Napa doesn’t get the last word. The vineyard does.
I think about that a lot, especially now. We move back home. We take on more responsibility. We watch the wine industry contract around us. And then we look at somebody like Jay, who quietly farmed his mountain for half a century without asking anyone’s permission, and it clarifies what this work is actually about.
Green & Red, and Tip Top
Green & Red sits in the Vacas, the eastern range that bookends Napa opposite the Mayacamas. The elevation matters. The exposure matters. But the geology is the thing that makes this vineyard sing.
The vineyard takes its name from California’s designated State Rock. Specifically, Green Serpentine and Red Chert, a distinctive stone formation that runs through the soil and gives the property both its color and its character. Red Chert isn’t a Napa rock in any ordinary sense. It’s older than that. It was formed on the seabed, back when this part of California was underwater, and then uplifted when the coastal ranges pushed up out of the Pacific. What’s under Jay’s terraces is, in a real sense, ancient ocean floor.
That matters, because the wine tastes like it.
Our fruit comes from a block near the peak called Tip Top. The name isn’t accidental. It sits at the highest, most exposed part of the property, on gravelly terraces threaded with that same Red Chert. Where Monte Rosso is volcanic and iron-heavy, Tip Top reads leaner and brighter. Where mountain Zin usually leans toward muscle, Heminway leans toward precision. That’s the chert speaking. The delicacy, the acid line, the way the fruit stays vibrant instead of going thick, is the seabed talking back through the vines.
The vines themselves are trellised, laid out on wire in orderly rows the way we train the fruit at our own Big Ranch site. They’re not the gnarled, sculptural, head-trained bush vines you find at Monte Rosso. Jay’s sculpture wasn’t in the individual plants. It was in the shape of the mountain itself.
The 2023 vintage
If you’ve read the earlier installments, you already know the shape of this vintage.
The drought years broke. Rains started right after the 2022 harvest closed and continued through spring. Groundwater came back. Temperatures stayed cool. Budbreak held off until April, flowering landed in the middle of May, and the summer moved slowly enough that flavor, sugar, acid, and tannin all had time to arrive at the same moment.
At Heminway that meant we could hold off the pick until October 5th, which is on the later side for us. The extra hangtime on cool ground gave us fruit that came in with real intensity but also with the kind of natural acidity that keeps a wine from ever feeling heavy.
We aged the wine fifteen months in French oak, twenty-five percent new. That’s a light hand on purpose. Jay’s vineyard doesn’t need oak to say something interesting. Oak is there to frame the wine, not to speak for it.
The wine
The nose opens on raspberry and cherry, brighter and lifted than you might expect from mountain fruit, with a scatter of crushed peppercorn and that unmistakable dry chaparral note you get from vineyards perched above the valley floor.
The palate is broad rather than tall. Bramble, strawberry preserves, lavender, cedar. The tannins are moderate and finely knit. Acidity does most of the structural work, which is exactly how I want a Heminway to read. It’s a wine that’s built to be drunk, not muscled through.
We made 294 cases.
A word on the reviews
The critics have been kind. 94 points from Wine Spectator, James Suckling, and Owen Bargreen. 93 from Wine Advocate and Vinous. 16.5+ from Jancis Robinson.
Those numbers help this wine find its audience, and I’m grateful for them. But the reason Heminway is on The Black List isn’t the score sheet. It’s the man on the label.
What we’re honoring
The best writing I’ve done in this series comes back to the same idea. Napa As It Was. And the wines that make it into The Black List tend to represent something bigger than themselves. Stagecoach represents ambition. Monte Rosso represents heritage. Aldo’s represents family.
Heminway represents a single person who made a fifty-plus-year bet on a piece of Napa mountain that nobody else wanted, and who was right the entire time.
There’s an idea that gets thrown around in wine writing that great vineyards are found. I don’t buy it. Great vineyards are made. They’re made by people who see something the market doesn’t see yet and who commit to it long enough for the land to answer them back.
Jay Heminway was one of those people. It’s a privilege to make wine from his mountain, and it’s a bigger privilege to put his name on the bottle. Tobin and Ray have the vineyard now, and the work continues. That kind of continuity, land passed from one committed steward to the next, is what The Black List is about.
To Jay, and to what he built.
