2022 Patland Vineyards Extended Barrel Aged Proprietary Red Wine Napa Valley 750 ml

When we asked Patland winemaker Felix Patland about his father’s inspiration for starting a winery, he was as decisive as Pacino in the final scene of Heat. 

“Caymus,” was his immediate answer. 

Felix’s dad Henry immigrated to the US from Ukraine, which was then part of the Soviet Union. After attending UC Santa Cruz (where he met his wife Olga) and founding a successful tech business, Henry and Olga started looking north from Silicon Valley to Napa. They bought a property on Soda Canyon Road in 2007, setting out to make wines like Caymus—showy, aromatic, anything-but-subtle reds.  

To get that Caymus-like concentration, you’ve gotta let the grapes hang. But in the warmer parts of Napa Valley, that can result in overripe, sometimes raisinated fruit, which Patland didn’t (and doesn’t) want. Thankfully, their winery enjoys a prime position in the south part of Napa Valley, where the vines are cooled by breezes off of San Pablo Bay. That means they get the concentration and developed tannins associated with long hang time, but not the overripeness that can come with excessive heat. 

It also doesn’t hurt that Patland has a primo up-the-mountain neighbor in the sprawling Stagecoach Vineyard, one of the most famous grape sources in Napa Valley. Their first winemaker worked with a lot of Stagecoach fruit, and that gave them an in. Now that Felix is running the show at the winery, he’s got a firm grasp on some excellent Stagecoach contracts. 

Add in some grapes from Carneros’s famed Hyde Vineyard and one of Andy Beckstoffer’s sites, you’ve got prime material for a blockbuster red wine. Toss in Felix’s CV—he trained at Cal Poly SLO in winemaking and enology, then dirtied his hands with Chappellet winemaker and Wine Access favorite Phil Titus—and you’ve got the ingredients for a bottle that achieves everything the Patland family set out to do, and then some.