2023 Monte Rio Cellars Mencia Silva Alta Mesa 750 ml

Patrick Cappiello spent the better part of two decades pouring some of the world’s greatest bottles to New York’s most demanding palates. He was the first sommelier at TriBeCa Grill, then Veritas, then wine director at GILT—eventually opening three acclaimed restaurants of his own, earning Food & Wine’s Sommelier of the Year and Imbibe’s Wine Person of the Year in the same calendar year. He knew every grand cru, every First Growth, every allocation list worth knowing.

And the whole time, something was nagging at him.

As a buyer, Cappiello kept running into the same problem: California, for all its winemaking talent and incredible raw material, had a glaring hole where affordable, honest, delicious wines should have been. The kind of wines he actually wanted to drink on a Tuesday. He filed it away for years. Then, around 2017, he stopped filing and started doing—moving to Sonoma, apprenticing under his close friend and winemaker Pax Mahle, and launching Monte Rio Cellars as his answer to the gap he’d spent a career noticing.

The philosophy is simple: work with family-owned, organically farmed vineyards, keep the winemaking hands-off, and let the fruit do the talking. The results are wines that feel less like a California pitch and more like a natural discovery—balanced, food-friendly, and genuinely surprising at the price.

The Mencía is a perfect case in point. The fruit comes from the Silvaspoons Vineyard in the Alta Mesa AVA—a high-plateau sub-appellation of Lodi, north of the city and south of Sacramento, where grower Ron Silva has spent decades championing Iberian varieties that most California vintners would never consider planting. Silva put in the first Mencía vines in California in 2014, using clones sourced directly from Bierzo, in Spain’s Galicia region, where the grape has thrived for centuries in cool, elevated terrain above the Sil River.

What Cappiello has done with it is characteristically light-handed: whole-cluster fermentation, neutral oak aging, minimal intervention from start to finish. The result is a wine that pulls off a neat trick—it’s unmistakably Californian, but with a real echo of coastal Spain.