2019 Inizi Charbono Calistoga Napa Valley 750 ml

There is a grape growing in Calistoga that Napa Valley almost lost entirely—and most people have never heard of it.

Charbono arrived in the Napa Valley in the 1880s, carried west by European immigrants who recognized in Calistoga’s volcanic soils and blazing summers something that reminded them of home. For decades, it was quietly important here. Inglenook—one of the Valley’s founding estates—grew it in a place of honor right in front of the winery’s great doors. Those who knew it, loved it.

Then the Judgment of Paris happened. When a Napa Cabernet Sauvignon beat the best of Bordeaux in 1976, the economics of every acre in the Valley shifted overnight. Heritage vineyards were pulled out and replanted to Cabernet. Charbono—which thrives in exactly the same conditions—was particularly vulnerable. Fewer than 65 acres survive in California today.

The families who still grow it in Calistoga do so out of something beyond logic. The Heitz family has farmed this ground for generations—their connection stretches back to the earliest days of the Valley’s wine industry, their Charbono vines tended through every shift in the Valley’s fortunes. When a previous buyer walked away from this block, it could easily have been grafted over to something more bankable. It wasn’t.

Inizi found it. A.J. Filipelli and John Harley—friends since studying Viticulture and Enology at Fresno State—had talked for years about making wine together. When A.J., who manages thousands of acres across Napa and Sonoma, learned that a local winery was no longer buying fruit from a Charbono block he’d been working with, he called John. That was the beginning. Inizi means “beginnings” in Italian—a nod to the founders’ Italian heritage and their belief that wine begins not in the cellar, but in the ground. Their label shows roots, not vines.

The 2019 season gave this late-ripening variety everything it needed: a wet winter, a long calm summer with few heat spikes, and the dramatic diurnal swings Calistoga is known for—days reaching triple digits, nights cooling by as much as 50 degrees, preserving the freshness and acidity that define this wine.