“Cathy Corison is my heroine. She makes such great wine - the essence of Napa Valley minus the bludgeoning force, plus a sensible price tag.”
WINEMAKING
The Power of Cabernet
Cathy has long known that she can’t make a wine any better than the grapes that come into the winery at harvest, so all year she spends most of her time and energy out in the vineyards. Grapegrowing and winemaking are a seamless continuum.
Our goal is to make Cabernet Sauvignon that is both powerful and elegant. Cabernet Sauvignon makes powerful wine no matter where, or how, it grows. For Cathy, it is much more interesting at the intersection with elegance, a seeming opposite. To do this, we source our Cabernet from alluvial Benchland between Rutherford and St. Helena where there are gravelly loam soils. This allows enough water in the soil for healthy summer growth, but the vines run dry at just the right time for ideal fruit ripening. A huge diurnal shift in temperature, with hot days and cold nights, promotes inky color, snappy natural acidity, and rich complexity of fresh fruit flavors.
Throughout the growing season we are careful to balance the vine vigor and crop, which requires meticulous handwork. Careful canopy management to optimize the air and light that reach the clusters yields fully ripe fruit that retains bright acidity at moderate sugar levels. We pick early, allowing the grapes to express the full spectrum of Cabernet fruit flavors from cherries and blueberries, through plums, cassis, and blackberries. Ample, velvety tannins give the wines gentle grip, which, combined with the firm acidity, allow the wines to grace the table and enjoy remarkable longevity.
Our winemaking is largely traditional and non-interventionist, with gentleness at every step. Everything we do is geared toward extracting all the goodness from the grapes and leaving anything undesirable behind. When fermentation is complete, the wines go down to small French oak barrels to spend the next 20 months undergoing the magical alchemy that is aging. We do our best to stay out of the wines’ way to allow it to speak of time and place.
VINEYARDS
Since 1987, the Corison Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon has been sourced from three benchland vineyards located between Rutherford and St. Helena. In 2023 we harvested our 37th vintage! Cathy creates a blend from these vineyards for a wine that expresses the full range of Cabernet Sauvignon flavors. In contrast, bottlings from estate vineyards Kronos and Sunbasket express individual terroir.
Kronos Vineyard
Kronos was one of the titans in Greek mythology, the sons of heaven and earth. That is right where wine sits for Cathy, between earth and sky. Located by William Martin and purchased in 1995, Kronos Vineyard is one of the last old Cabernet vineyards in the Napa Valley. Planted in 1971 on St. George rootstock, which is completely resistant to Phylloxera, the gnarly, wise old ladies are over 50 years old! Yields are pitifully low at 1.25 tons/acre, but the singular wine it produces proves it to be one of the great Cabernet vineyards of the world. Cathy considers it a gift to have the opportunity to work with these old vines because they yield concentrated, complex, inky, structured, aromatic wines at very moderate alcohols. Farmed organically, these deep-rooted veterans sail through any weather.
Sunbasket Vineyard
Corison Winery has sourced Sunbasket Vineyard for over 25 years, sharing it with Shafer Vineyards for many years until they became an exclusively estate winery over 10 years ago. Since then, Corison has taken all the fruit. Cathy has long valued Sunbasket for its bright red and blue fruit and pretty aromatics. Serendipity, and William Martin’s hard work, allowed us to buy it in 2015, adding it to our estate. The first thing we did was to convert it to sustainable farming methods, and it is now certified organic. We were thrilled to release our first Sunbasket Vineyard wines in the fall of 2017!
Sunbasket Vineyard was originally planted in the early 1950’s by the legendary winemaker, André Tchelistcheff. Affectionately known as the ‘Maestro’, he influenced generations of Napa Valley winemakers. The vineyard is situated in sunny Saint Helena on the classic alluvial gravelly loam soils that are known as the ‘bench’. Referring to the exceptional amount of sunshine in this corner of the world, André called it a “sunbasket”. It is truly a great vineyard and we’re proud to continue as stewards of its distinguished heritage.