Harvesting the flavor of 3 Napa wineries

When you're visiting Napa Valley, it can be tempting to taste up the middle.

To follow Highway 29, which roughly bisects the valley floor, and stop only at big name wineries with idling limos out front and splashy tasting rooms inside (and correspondingly splashy tasting fees).

When it's time to nosh, it also can be tempting to join the hordes at Highway 29 tourist traps like Dean & DeLuca (with $12-a-pound chicken salad) or the V. Sattui market and picnic grounds.

But Napa Valley is a diverse place; vinously speaking, it offers as much of interest at the edges as at the center.

The Reno Gazette-Journal visits three wineries that lie beyond the hurly-burly of the usual suspects in the central valley.

None of these wineries is boutique or culty — indeed, all three are established Napa names — but they have in common lovely grounds (even by Napa Valley standards), casually elegant tasting rooms and a concern for quality not always associated with larger houses.

Brand name, artisan spirit

A few miles south of Markham Vineyards, the shopping district of central St. Helena, Calif., features diversions like shoes, chocolate and haute hippy frocks that have nothing to do with wine. But get beyond the traffic, and you'll find koi ponds lining the approach to the winery's stone facade and serene, airy tasting room.

Wine has been made on the Markham site since the 1870s, and winery President Bryan Del Bondio, scion of an old Napa wine family, once played on the property he now oversees.

The winery is perhaps best known for its merlot. But in recent years, Markham's sauvignon blanc has garnered attention.

Change is afoot these days at Markham, too.

There's new winery equipment, a new cellar master and a new oenologist.

"We're really trying to get back to our roots and make more artisan—style wines within the scope of a large brand," says winemaker Kimberlee Nicholls.

"There's so much competition in Napa Valley, you have to do every little bit you can."

Stags Leap star

The buildings of Chimney Rock Winery rise — white as tufa — against the craggy foothills in the southeast corner of the Napa Valley floor. The winery's sinuous gables and other features recall the Cape Dutch architecture of South Africa.

Beds of blooming flowers pop with color and heighten the winery's stark beauty. Soaring ceilings and dark wood floors compose the tasting room, which gives onto a terrace and a groovy rectangular reflecting pool.

Chimney Rock encompasses a prime 110—acre patch of the Stags Leap District, one of the best in Napa for red wine grapes.

"These are lower alcohol wines," says supervising winemaker Douglas Fletcher of the '05 Stags Leap District cabernet sauvignon and the '05 Elevage, Chimney Rock's proprietary red blend.

Both are labeled at 14.2 percent alcohol content. "These are not wines that say, 'Look at me.' They aren't the loudest ones with the most alcohol, the most extraction."

Bold elevation

Some wineries are founded by folks who started out in another business (often a highly remunerative one far afield from farming). Others are founded by folks with more direct experience of the soil. Rutherford Hill Winery, begun in 1972, is one of the latter.

"Our story is the story of a group of grape growers using their own fruit — to make their own wines," says Kay Malaske of Rutherford Hill.

Rutherford Hill occupies a 26—acre mountainside perch more than 400 feet above the Napa Valley floor; the ritzy Auberge du Soleil resort lies just down mountain.

The view from Rutherford Hill stretches across the valley to the Mayacamas Mountains in the west, and the winery's beamed, brawny redwood buildings seem to rise almost organically from the hillside.

Beyond vino and vistas, the caves at Rutherford Hill rank among the winery's chief attractions.

Cypress trees and a trellis soaring almost 25 feet flank the entrance to the caves. Boston ivy laces the trellis; periwinkles and hot pink morning glories add jots of color.

The caves encompass a network of 100—yard corridors (scooped from the volcanic mountains) that sprawls more than 44,000 square feet.

A stack of new oak barrels, just received by the winery, stretched across the entrance to one corridor.

The barrels were beautiful in their virginity, sitting silently, awaiting their fill of juice.