Kapcsándy Family Winery, Napa: Current Releases(1)
Napa has a way of turning modest dreams into major productions. Lou Kapcsándy and his wife Bobbie decided to retire to Napa mostly out of nostalgia for the picnics and wine tasting they used to do as a young married couple living in Sausalito. Forty years after the first of these romantic escapes, their retirement dream included only a little cottage with at most an acre or so of vines, so Lou could putter in the garage and make a barrel or two of wine from his backyard fruit.
Three years after the family, including their son Louis, made the first tour of the small cottages for sale in the valley, the family was harvesting fifteen and a half acres of Cabernet and Merlot to make the first 
vintage of what will undoubtedly be one of Napa's top wines for the decades to come.
Perhaps Lou Kapcsándy's shrewd eye for a good piece of ground can be blamed for turning a simple retirement dream into an entirely new career and a family obsession. Born and raised in Hungary, a young, immigrant Kapcsándy (pronounced cap-CHAN-dee) trained as a chemical engineer, spent some time in the military, as a pro football player, as a mechanical engineer, and finally as an entrepreneur and, for 20 years, a commercial contracting magnate, of sorts. Nearly a billion dollars in annual revenue later, Kapcsándy knows a thing or two about sizing up land for development.
And when it comes to wine, Kapcsándy knows a thing or two as well, thanks to a near 40 year obsession with Bordeaux. Kapcsándy and his wife (and later his son, too) have been traveling to Bordeaux for decades.
All of which might explain why, when the Kapcsándy family happened upon a plot of land known as the State Lane vineyard, they quickly realized that the dreams of a simple cottage in the valley were about to be replaced by something much bigger.
The State Lane Vineyard sits at the corner of State Lane and Yountville Crossroads in Napa, and was made famous by the Beringer Winery decades ago as the source for some of Beringer's most prized vineyard-designated fruit, and a part of some of the most important wines in the history of Napa Valley.
In 1999 vines on the property succumbed to the predations of Phylloxera. The vineyard was being prepared for redevelopment in anticipation of renewing its contract with Beringer when the family learned that the owner might be interested in selling. It represented an opportunity too good for the Kapcsándys to pass up.
Whenever someone takes over an historic vineyard, like State Lane in Napa, there's a period of time when those familiar with it hold their breath. Like a new family buying an old, majestic house on the block, you never know whether they're going to replace it with some modern monstrosity or refurbish it to the height of its glory.
By now, everyone in Yountville has breathed a sigh of relief. With the precision and aggressive timeline that no doubt characterized his work for decades before, Lou Kapcsándy ripped out all 15 acres of the beleaguered, Phylloxera infected rootstock and replanted the property in several blocks, each with rootstocks carefully matched to the several types of soil found on the property. In 9 short months, a brand new winery was also constructed, capable of shepherding the roughly 3000 cases the estate expects to produce safely from field to bottle.
The Kapcsándy Family Winery enlisted the help of Helen Turley and her husband John Wetlaufer to oversee the replanting of the vineyards and the first couple of vintages. Starting in 2005 the winemaking was transitioned to the team of Denis Malbec (cellar master of Chateau Latour) and Rob Lawson who spent 14 years as the head winemaker for the Napa Wine Company. Despite the caliber of their hired help, Kapcsándy Family Winery is run almost entirely by the family. Lou and his son Louis jointly make nearly every decision about all aspects of the winery's operations (a natural extension of the partnership they began in 1999 when they started a wine importing business together), and Louis is gradually taking over more and more of the winemaking responsibility.
Like many of Napa's top vineyards, the winegrowing and winemaking regimen at Kapcsándy is extremely rigorous -- from the dense precision spacing of the vines, to the strict yield reduction and canopy management, to the dogmatic insistence on harvesting the grapes only at phenolic maturity (a measurement of the presence and concentration of compounds like anthocyanins and tannins). Grapes are hand picked, block by block, in multiple passes through the vineyard, and are completely destemmed before being sorted, painstakingly, berry by berry into the fermentation tanks. During this sorting process, which involves dozens of people, up to 15% of the grapes are removed due to imperfections. Fermentations take place with minimal fuss or intervention. The wines are bottled completely unfined and unfiltered after aging in 100% new French and Hungarian oak for approximately 20 months.
