2023 Crosby Roamann Sauvignon Blanc Estate Bottled Napa Valley 750 ml

The founders and driving force behind Crosby Roamann are Sean and Juliana McBride, a couple who both fell in love with wine independently before they even found each other: Sean at a wine and cheese store in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Juliana while studying abroad in Italy. A fateful trip up the California coast sealed the deal, and in 2010 they decided to go pro.

For a long time, all the wines they made were from purchased grapes: It wasn’t until 2020 that they were able to acquire their own vineyard—a tiny parcel in windswept Carneros. Hugged by fog and wind off of San Pablo Bay, it’s a perfect place to grow Sauvignon Blanc. 

The wind thickens the grapes’ skins, providing extra character to the pressed juice, and the diurnal shifts ensure that the McBrides can wait until there’s plenty of richness and texture, confident that there will always be plenty of vibrant acidity in the finished wine.

They turn to wild yeasts to do the work and concrete eggs as the vessel for fermentation of this wine, as the porosity of concrete allows for gentle micro-oxygenation and the shape creates convection that stir the lees on its own. Once that’s done, they rack the wine into a mixture of new French oak for texture and opulence, and stainless steel for brightness and energy. 

The combination is a Sauvignon Blanc that screams Napa class—the 95-point score is no fluke—but the Crosby Roamann ethos is to keep prices reasonable. So even as their peers charge $75 or $100 for bottles, this is still under $50 at the winery.