Today, it is entirely possible that two full generations of younger, savvy wine drinkers find Napa Valley monumentally uncool: luxury-oriented, points-chasing, boring. Clearly, none of them have met Ketan Mody, the founder and winemaker at Jasud Estate and Beta Wines. 

Mody, who's 43 and whose father emigrated from India, is perhaps best understood as a punk-rock fusion of Sisyphus and the Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka. On the dashboard of his truck is a post-it note emblazoned with a simple reminder: ‘Death can come at any time.’ His raspy, growly, slightly-stony drawl—he was born in Athens, Georgia—suggests an overgrown skater kid who, on occasion, fronts a death-metal band. At times, he struggles to get  through a paragraph without using variations of the f-word seventeen times, give or take. 

Right now, though, the burly Mody is in his element: bathed in morning sunlight, near the apex of Napa’s Diamond Mountain, very far from the Valley’s everyday hubbub, standing in the vineyard that he planted. He’s telling the story behind it, and it’s a good one. 

The (very) short version: He bought 60 acres back in 2008, when he was still in his mid-twenties and when this land was thickly forested with redwoods, douglas firs, and manzanitas. Over the next several years, he painstakingly logged and cleared the land, built a couple cabins, and planted around 15 acres of Cabernet vines in its volcanic and ultra-rocky soils.

That fruit goes into his Jasud Estate wines. (He buys fruit from select single-vineyards for his Beta bottlings.) Jasud released its first commercially-available vintage in 2019, garnering raves from those lucky enough to snag a bottle. Then the Glass Fire of 2020 decimated his operation, burning down his cabins and everything in them, and around 40 percent of his vineyard. “This place,” Mody says, “was sterilized.” 

So he and his tiny crew cleared the debris and replanted. 

His is a hand-built-from-scratch Napa project of a sort that barely exists today. His is a vineyard that would make the most egregious wine hipster’s heart flutter. Dry-farmed. (“In the short term, it’s a lot of fucking work,” he says. “In the long term, the vines are more regulated, and know themselves much more—they feel their own mortality.”) No sprays. No chemicals were applied to the land, well, ever, since it was a forest when he bought it. Its vines originate from cuttings from the region’s most prized and classic vineyards—Diamond Creek, Eisele, Martha’s Vineyard, and To Kalon, among others. 

Some of these cuttings, Mody says, were actually acquired legitimately. 

None of this, of course, would matter if his singular wines weren’t, you know, good. But they are extraordinary. And something about the scene—the cedar and redwood stakes dotting the vineyard and the tall trees on its outskirts, the profound silences, the crystalline mountain air, the peaks of the Palisades in the distance and the fog banks clinging to the valley floor below—feels like a Napa of a previous era. 

An era, it turns out, that’s frequently on Mody’s mind. “The late '60s and the '70s was probably peak Napa for me,” he’d told me a few days earlier. “Pieces of ground were being discovered that had such a strong voice.”

Back then, winemakers “were making those wines like they were dancing like no one was watching,” he continued. “A hell of a lot of honesty came out of that.” When he concluded that “the seventies were more cowboy-farmer. The eighties were about ‘better living through chemistry,’” it was clear which ethos he prefers. 

While Mody is (far) further toward the cowboy end of that spectrum, he and a tight coterie of winemakers still stand for an idea of Napa that places farming—and any vineyard’s terroir and voice—first. These winemakers’ Cabernets stand noticeably apart from the high-octane, boozy, and very ripe styles that entered Napa’s lexicon in the nineties, took over soon after, and still dominate the region today. 

Their wines often harken back to—forgive the sentimentality and partial cliché—a simpler and more idiosyncratic Napa. One where a rough-hewn elegance stood alongside an evolved rusticity—or even, at times, a rusticity that was not at all evolved. One innocent of 100-point wines, pricey winemaking consultants, and a Highway 29 choked with tourist traffic. One in which Robert Parker Jr.’s name was unknown to any Californian. 

You can find such winemakers scattered throughout the region. They’re on the Napa Valley floor, where Cathy Corison, Spottswoode’s Aron Weinkauf, and Alex and Graeme Macdonald of the deservedly-hyped Macdonald Vineyards work the dirt of the vaunted Rutherford Bench organically; the Macdonalds do so in a particularly prime patch of the legendary To Kalon vineyard. (Their great-grandfather acquired that land in 1954, when, to his chagrin, he had to take it as a condition of buying a house he coveted.)

They’re up on Spring Mountain, where longtimers Charlie and Stu Smith planted and established Smith-Madrone in the early Seventies, where they continue to create savory and spicy Cabernets—along with, in an anomaly for Napa, a shockingly good Riesling from their estate’s grapes. The Smiths are just up Spring Mountain Road from where Philip Togni established his namesake winery in the early ‘80s; his daughter Lisa now crafts that estate’s majestic, very structured reds.

Meanwhile, on Howell Mountain, the sui generis Dunn family run the sui generis Dunn Vineyards. In Oak Knoll, Steve Matthiasson makes precise low-alcohol wines while consulting on organic and regenerative viticulture to many other local wineries. Near the top of Mount Veeder, next door to Mayacamas, Rob Black and Julia van der Vink of Aerika are tending their newly planted vines, and making wine from neighboring longstanding vineyards while planning to release their first estate Cabernets later this decade. And at Harlan Estate, its winemaker Cory Empting is quietly overseeing a marked evolution of its wines and vineyard at one of the region’s most prestigious addresses. 

It’s also worth noting that all of these wineries in this article are still owned and run by the families that established them. It takes a certain stick-to-it-iveness to tread their path, one that’s a hell of a lot easier to do within the context of a family-owned business. 

But now, in Mody’s winery, it’s time to taste. “You want to know what fucking Cabernet tastes like?” he demands, peering down into a glassful of a 2023 Jasud Estate Own-Rooted bottling, of which he will release a grand total of 100 magnums. “Roll the gloves off.”

I mean, how can you refuse?

If you’re reading The New Wine Review, you’re probably aware of the general catechism governing how clued-in drinkers think about wine today: low-intervention winery practices; regenerative or organic farming practices; wines that communicate terroir rather than any variety’s maximal ripeness . . . I’ll stop. You know the drill. 

Particularly with regard to that last point, Napa’s New Traditionalists are still decidedly swimming against the primary currents in their region. At times doing things their way was even harder—by which I mean ‘maybe we’re going to go under’ harder. 

Robert Parker Jr.'s review of Corison's 1990 Napa Cabernet chided it for being "slightly less intense and complex than several of its peers." He scored it 85-89, which, translated and re-weighted, is approximately a B-minus—at best—for a serious wine. That pretty much set the template for his reviews of her next several vintages, until, after 1995's, he ignored them for an entire decade.

And, as recounted by Jon Bonné in his 2013 book The New California Wine, in 2000, when Tim Mondavi was still producing classically-styled Napa Cabernets for his father’s Robert Mondavi Winery, Parker basically went after him with a nailgun. Mondavi made, Parker wrote, ”indifferent, innocuous wines that err on the side of intellectual vapidness over the pursuit of wines of heart, soul, and pleasure,” with “intricate aromas too subtle and restrained.” 

I urge you to pause here  to consider—to savor, even—how “intricate aromas” in a wine could somehow be considered a bad thing.

Wine Spectator’s Tim Laube, in the second edition of his then-definitive '90s-era tome California Wines, rated Corison’s winery with a pat-on-the-head three stars out of five, and gave a string of scores in the 80s to her first decade or so of vintages. (I had spectacular 1993 and 1998 Corison Napa Valley Cabernets earlier this month, and while The New Wine Review is not in the business of scoring wines, I promise you this: those are not, say, 85-point wines.) For a significant chunk of the '70s and '80s—an era of Mondavi that I eagerly seek out; an era during which, in the opinion of some winemakers featured in this article, Mondavi produced benchmark wines—Laube gave Mondavi’s Private Reserve several scores in the 70s and 80s 

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t give any airtime to critical reactions, but bad reviews are uniquely wounding for Napa wineries. For good or ill, the region’s business is unusually dependent on critics’ scores. When Parker lambasted Mondavi in 2000, the winery was publicly traded. As crazy as this may sound today, in the wake of Parker's comments, Mondavi's stock dropped 14 points, author Julia Flynn Siler recounted in The House of Mondavi, her 2007 book about the Mondavi family saga.

For her part, Corison refused to mention Parker by name when I visited her earlier this month, when she briefly alluded to past critical contretemps. (Though I did think it was kind of cool when she told me later that she was a very big fan of Northern Rhône wines “until a certain wine critic got ahold of them.”) For his, Matthiasson cited the somm at a major New York City restaurant who, circa 2008, turned down his wines with one sharp comment: “Why would I drink fake Europe when I can drink real Europe?” 

“We were really struggling,” he recalls now. “The world had decided that Napa wines are a certain way.” And while Cathy Corison is now firmly established among the pantheon of Napa’s greats, she admits that it “took a good quarter century for this”–meaning her winery—”to be a going concern.” 

Given all that, I’d love to declare that such classically-styled, nouveau ancienne Cabernets are officially ascendant, and that a pendulum has decisively swung back from ripeness and what Bonné aptly dubbed Big Flavor. It would be a great story. One that I’d like a great deal, because I adore Napa Cabs of past eras, before the region’s race to ripeness became damn near legion—to my palate, at least—somewhere in the middle '90s

Reality, of course, is far less tidy. A glance at Napa’s historical average Brix readings—the industry standard measure of  ripeness—for Cabernet Sauvignon, which is publicly available online, shows a steady trendline upwards that has yet to recede. In 1991, Napa County Cabernet grapes' average Brix clocked in at 23.1. Their average Brix in 2022 was 25.5, and 2024’s preliminary report pegs it at 26.2. Nerds can dig in for the full data, which shows slight vintage-to-vintage variation while clearly pointing one way: up.

“People are picking too late,” says Corison. She would know: because she picks her grapes earlier, she has no trouble finding crews to help her harvest—they’re sitting around, idle, waiting for the riper-oriented wineries to call. And while a hotter climate in sunny Napa means sweeter and sweeter grapes, it’s worth noting that the winemakers listed herein keep alcohol and ripeness levels in check. Matthiasson and Mody, to name two, have recently released Cabernets with alcohol levels below 13% ABV. (There are also many things that one can do in a vineyard to protect vines from over-ripening from excessive heat—a few months ago, Matthiasson spoke at length to The New Wine Review about this topic.)

And yet, at Harlan, Cory Empting has subtly but decidedly moved towards the new classicists’ camp, both in the winery and in the vineyard. The 2020 fires forced an earlier harvest at Harlan, and the estate picked its fruit in mid-August. (Unlike many in the Valley, Harlan was able to produce its wines that vintage; my tasting notes for that one and many others from the wineries mentioned here will be published in an upcoming article.) That made him more comfortable with picking earlier, period, at lower ripeness levels. Over time he’s also shifted Harlan’s oak regimen, too. Where his wines once saw 100 percent new oak, they now see 60 percent used oak. 80 percent of Harlan’s vineyard is now dry-farmed, and the most recently planted plot has been dry-farmed since day one. He’s started a very interesting program called Vine Masters, in which vineyard workers ‘own’ their plots—the particulars of that initivative are well-covered here—and while space forbids a detailed discussion of Harlan viticulture, Empting has taken Harlan’s farming much deeper into regenerative realms.

“If you can do one less thing and get a better result, why wouldn’t you?” is how the soft-spoken Empting puts it, citing Fukuoka’s renowned book The One Straw Revolution. (Mody lent it to him, back when Mody briefly worked at Harlan.)

Clued-in locals have noticed. “Their farming is extreme on the regenerative side,” says Matthiasson, who knows from long experience what’s real and what’s not in that realm. “People wouldn’t expect that from a hardcore luxury brand. But they’re doing really cool stuff.” 

“It’s a huge deal, what he’s done,” echoes Graeme Macdonald, whose winery employs a grand total of two people: him and his brother—and who also casually referenced The One Straw Revolution when we spoke. “We’re on, like, a little Italian sports car. He’s on the Titanic.”

There are, of course, significant differences amongst these wineries. Some have farmed organically forever, like Spottswoode, which has been at it since the ‘80s, and Matthiasson; others have reworked farming practices more recently, like Dunn and Harlan. Mody and Lisa Togni are dry-farming diehards; others acknowledge the reality that 100 percent dry farming won’t always work on all or parts of their vineyards. (Napa has rainy winters—earlier this month, Stu Smith told me that Smith-Madrone received 13 inches of rain in just 72 hours—and bone-dry summers, and water issues are a major local concern.) That said, any winemaker listed herein can give you, in minute detail, what they do in their vineyards and why, or the specifics of how they manage their vines' canopies against the intense Napa sun.

All such vineyard developments, taken together, are why Corison is clear-eyed about the Napa she landed in during the mid-Seventies. "When I got here 50 years ago, the style that was very common was very much like what I'm doing today," she says. "But the wines are better today, because we're farming better."

And while none of these winemakers may make wines that will satisfy Big Flavor acolytes, there’s a clear stylistic range. One will never mistake Macdonald’s and Corison’s Cabernets, which showcase Valley fruit richness within admirably different frameworks, for Matthiasson’s leaner and intensely focused expressions, or the slow-to-develop hillside wines of Dunn, Smith-Madrone, and Philip Togni. “If you can wait at least 20 years [to drink Togni wines], that would be great,” Lisa Togni says. “Ideally, you know, 40 or 50,” she added, while admitting that it’s “kind of hard to advise people” on that timeframe. 

But great wines from other great regions take long to develop, too. Meanwhile, less patient drinkers should know that, in many cases—Dunn, Philip Togni, and Spottswoode, for starters—you can often buy 20-, 30-, and even 40-year old Cabernets for around the same price of current releases.

When I was in Napa, the topic of declining wine sales was never far from peoples’ minds. Part of it is demographic: Bordeaux and Napa are arguably the regions that Baby Boomers prized more than succeeding generations, and what’s been going on with Bordeaux En Primeur sales is well-documented. 

Others cited a different demographic concern, and identified to Mody as the last of a certain breed–the ambitious and gifted aspiring young winemaker who arrives in Napa and becomes determined to launch their own project there. While this ignores Aerika, which completed its purchase of vineyard land on Mount Veeder in 2022, there’s more than a grain of truth to it. Back in the '70s, that described the Smith brothers of Smith-Madrone and Corison, all of whom grew up in Southern California.

Today, though, costs for land are beyond astronomical, as are grape costs, and environmental regulations make the task of planting new vineyards land somewhere between “really, really onerous” and “utterly impossible.” It’s telling that Mody bought his land during a major economic downturn, and that Aerika’s Black and van der Vink began their buying process during pandemic-era doldrums. And Mody later told Jancis Robinson that recently established regulations would forbid him from planting most of his vineyard today. 

Those two don’t have many younger-than-Gen-X founder-winemaker compatriots. There’s Alex and Graeme Macdonald’s operation. As well as Erin and Massimo Di Costanzo of Di Costanzo, who don’t own a vineyard but are producing commendable classically-styled single-vineyard Cabernets that fit in well with the others mentioned herein.

The Macdonald brothers started experimenting with winemaking when they were teenagers, and started hanging out with older winemakers then. “After 20 years,” says Alex Macdonald, who’s 38, “we’re still the youngest at every party, pretty much.”

This is rather radically different from what’s going on in Burgundy. While land costs there are also exorbitant, a generation of talented young negociants are producing spectacular and highly-prized wines. At least one of them—Chanterêves—has moved from merely purchasing fruit to also owning vineyard plots. (It’s worth noting that one key reason this is even possible is that Burgundy’s regional footprint is significantly larger than Napa’s.)

Mody, while not generally an optimist, sees an upside in this burst of new energy in Burgundy. “That’s a higher mountain to climb, and they did it,” he says.  “If you can do it there, why the fuck can’t you do it in Napa?”

Even if it’s no longer the Napa that Cathy Corison came to in 1975, two days after graduating from college, with little more than $200 stuffed into a pocket and a burning desire to make wine. Back when you could seat all of Napa’s major Cabernet winemakers at a reasonably-sized dinner party. Back when Al Brounstein realized that the land he’d purchased at Diamond Creek contained four distinct terroirs within its small acreage, and created separate bottlings for each. Back when a college-age Stu Smith could strike a deal for 200 acres on Spring Mountain for $350 per. Back when land was cheap, when a new Napa was forming, when idiosyncrasy in the Valley—and especially in its hills—ran as high as you could fly your freak flag. 

But the land persists. It will outlive us all. Through the best of its winemakers, you can still hear it speak. 

For detailed tasting notes on these producers' wines going back to the 1980s, click here.