2024 Lang & Reed Chenin Blanc Napa Valley 750 ml

Nobody arrives at Chenin Blanc by accident.

For John and Tracey Skupny, the founders of Lang & Reed, the path ran straight through the Loire Valley—the region that first captured their imaginations when they were young and newly in love, wandering through Bordeaux and the Loire before staking their claim in Napa. The Cab Francs of Chinon and Bourgueil became their obsession, and when they launched Lang & Reed in 1993, they set out to make the definitive California expression of the grape. Three decades later, most people in the wine world would say they succeeded.

But the Loire isn’t only Cab Franc country. It’s also the home of Chenin Blanc—the variety behind Vouvray, Savannières, and some of the most age-worthy white wines on earth. If you’ve spent thirty years drinking deeply from that well, Chenin Blanc isn’t a detour. It’s the other half of the story. Their son Reed, who trained at Domaine Bernard Baudry in Chinon and now heads the Chenin Blanc program, made sure of it.

The 2024 is sourced from a two-acre Napa Valley vineyard—a site so small it barely registers on a map, but one that gives the wine its characteristic tension. In the cellar, the grapes are whole-cluster pressed and left to settle before going into a mix of French oak and stainless steel, with half the lots fermenting on indigenous yeasts. The lees are stirred twice a week, building the texture and mid-palate weight that sets this wine apart from California whites that lean on ripeness alone.

Context helps: Napa Valley once had over 3,000 acres of Chenin Blanc in the ground. Today, fewer than 20 remain. The Skupnys are among a tiny handful of producers keeping the variety alive here, and the results make a compelling case for why someone should.

James Suckling, who called it “consistently one of Napa’s best releases of Chenin Blanc,” has it right—and at a winery price of $75, it’s a bottle that earns every dollar. In the glass: orchard fruit, talcum powder, flint, lemon oil, and crushed stone on the nose, with a mid-weighted palate built on taut, nervy acidity and a fruity, minerally finish.