It's a common belief that Napa Valley is a limited area; put that belief up against the can-do spirit of \"Jersey Boys,\" however, and suddenly Napa Valley can expand.\r\nHence Kinsella Estates, a slice of Napa Valley across the county line in Sonoma County's Dry Creek Valley. Except for that pesky location where the grapes grow, Kinsella ticks all the modern Napa Valley boxes:\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\nRelated stories:\r\n\r\n\r\nFestive Q&A: Sam Neill\r\n\r\n\r\nGallo Buys Sonoma's J Vineyards\r\n\r\n\r\nQ&A: Bret Lopez, Scarecrow\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n* wealthy owner who made his money in other industries, mostly tech investing but also as a financier of the aforementioned Broadway hit \"Jersey Boys\"\r\n* cult Cabernet winemaker, Thomas Rivers Brown\r\n* vineyard management by a Calistoga-based company, Clark Vineyard Management;\r\n* the wine is even made in Calistoga\r\n* three different Cabernets, priced from $95 to $125, from a winery that makes only about 2000 cases total\r\n* unique and attractive bottle that costs more to produce than the majority of actual wines drunk in the United States\r\n* acclaim from Robert Parker, with two 95-point scores and even some design advice (more on that below).\r\n\"Except for the terroir, which is Dry Creek, everything about the Kinsella Estates brand is Napa-centric,\" owner Kevin Kinsella says. \"We have no equipment here. This is essentially a grape farm.\"\r\nWines like these in Napa Valley are like penguins in Antarctica: everywhere. But in Dry Creek Valley, which mostly hangs its reputation on Zinfandel, Kinsella Estates stands out. The 75-acre property does have 22 rows of Zinfandel, which go into a separate wine, and eight rows of Petit Verdot used for blending. Otherwise, it's all Cabernet Sauvignon.\r\nWhy Cabernet? I asked Kinsella.\r\n\"Because it's the king of grapes,\" he said. \"I've always loved it. It fetches the highest price. (Winemaker) Thomas (Rivers Brown), he doesn't need another Napa client. This was a challenge to grow great Cabernet in the Dry Creek Valley.\"\r\nVineyard manager Josh Clark says the hills surrounding the estate make growing Cabernet easier. There's no question Dry Creek Valley has enough heat and sunlight to ripen Cabernet; the question is whether it has too much.\r\n\"It's a hillside vineyard for the most part, but it has a nice amount of water retention,\" Clark says. \"It's a little bit moderated from the real hot days. It's a nice site. It's not anything super-extreme. Some places are really really windy or really really hot, but (Kinsella) is in a protected valley.\"\r\nKinsella has a nice house on the property and when he bought the estate for $2.85 million he inherited some interesting architectural perks, like a separate 14-seat sushi house, for which he sometimes brings in a visiting chef, and an alpaca barn he now uses for goats. There's also a man-made lake that gives a hedge against droughts. It's easy to see, sitting in Kinsella's living room overlooking the vineyards, why he wanted the place.\r\nKinsella is an interesting guy. He's a longtime business consultant and one of his first major successes was an international marketing plan he wrote in 1974 for the government of Peru. He suggested they market quinoa, which nobody outside South America had heard of at the time. He has also invested in Zynga, maker of annoying Facebook games, and stealth technology for fast-moving warships.\r\nBut his most public success was, with Jersey Boys. Kinsella, who wears a Jersey Boys baseball hat, had no previous experience with theater investment when he went to see the play in its initial incarnation in the La Jolla Playhouse in San Diego, where he lives most of the time. The play is about the life and times of the musical group Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons.\r\n\"At intermission I went up to the director and said: 'I don't do this for a living but I have to invest in this because I know it's going to be a big hit when it gets to Broadway',\" Kinsella recalled.\r\nHe wasn't wrong. Jersey Boys ran for more than 11 years on Broadway, making it the 12th-longest running show ever, just behind Rent and Beauty and the Beast. (If you're wondering about current fave Hamilton, it just cracked the top 100.) The show continues to tour (Kinsella had seen it 122 times as of my visit last month) and thus make money for its investors. In Broadway's high-risk investment model, most shows lose money but a few earn back a fortune; there's a reason Kinsella's baseball hat doesn't say \"Quinoa\".\r\nThat's part of the reason behind the unique bottle design. Kinsella hired a Los Angeles-based designer, Peter Stougaard, whose main gig is designing logos for movies including Ice Age and Avatar. Stougaard had never designed a wine bottle before and he came up with something compelling: a removable metal coin that is attached to the bottle by two-sided tape. Weather symbols on the back of the coin suggest the Four Seasons.\r\n\"It took us five years to get it right,\" Kinsella says. \"The coin itself costs $2.38. The bottle mold is made in Italy. It was so difficult to pull off that there were talks about changing it. Then we tasted with Robert Parker and he said: 'That is the most beautiful bottle I've ever seen'.\"\r\nThe coin was a hassle but the payoff now is that each bottle has a collectible good-luck charm that serves as a great incentive to buy it.\r\n\"We sell a lot of wine at country clubs,\" Kinsella says. \"The coin, if you're a golfer, is a good ball marker.\"\r\nAs for the wines, Parker gave 95 points to both the 2014 Kinsella Estates Jersey Boys Vineyard Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon and Kinsella Estates Spencer Vineyard Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. They are, as you'd expect, fruit-driven wines with plush tannins, but they're also not quite as high in alcohol as you might expect: 14.5 percent for the Jersey Boys Vineyard wine; 14.4 percent for the Spencer Vineyard. As you'd expect with a wine made by Brown, there's good structure and balance.\r\nI asked Kinsella if he had the opportunity to move over the county line into Napa Valley, would he take it?\r\n\"No. I love it here,\" he said. \"Healdsburg has become the new It Town in wine country.\"\r\nIf anybody can pick a hit at first sight, it's the guy in the Jersey Boys hat.","datePublished":"2018-03-26 00:00:00","dateModified":"2018-03-26 00:00:00","author":"@id":"https:\/\/www.wine-searcher.com\/bios","publisher":"@id":"https:\/\/www.wine-searcher.com\/#person","isPartOf":"@id":"https:\/\/www.wine-searcher.com\/m\/2018\/03\/broadway-money-moves-napa-westward\/#webpage","image":"@id":"\/images\/news\/65\/41\/kins1-10006541.jpg","inLanguage":"en-US","mainEntityOfPage":"@id":"https:\/\/www.wine-searcher.com\/m\/2018\/03\/broadway-money-moves-napa-westward\/#webpage"}]} Latest News and FeaturesOregon Uproar over Underage Liquor Drops
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