Caymus: A Cabernet for Cowboys and Kings

Photo courtesy of Caymus Vineyards

By Larry Printz | THE NAPA EVENT

California is a place that reinvents itself every generation or so. It was once gold mines and saloons, then orange groves and Hollywood, then surfing and silicon chips. But the most delicious trick California ever pulled was convincing the world that it could make wine—serious wine, not the jug-and-screw-cap stuff your uncle buys by the gallon to spike spaghetti sauce.

Grapes were just another thing in the dirt, like walnuts, like prunes. Honest crops. But there was something about the Rutherford soil — gravelly, sunlit, stubborn — that whispered promises in the language of Cabernet Sauvignon.

It’s 1972, and America is a mess. Vietnam unraveling, Watergate on the front page, cars getting uglier by the minute. And yet Napa Valley is beginning to hum with a strange new optimism. Robert Mondavi is shouting from the rooftops that California could rival Bordeaux. Most of the world thought he was nuts.

Enter Chuck Wagner. Twenty years old and hair too long, he convinced his parents, Charlie and Lorna Belle, that the family shouldn’t just cultivate grapes for somebody else’s wine. No. What they were growing in Rutherford was too good to hand over. They should bottle their own, put their name on it. It wasn’t the first time his parents would change course. They had ripped out their vines and grown walnuts and prunes during Prohibition.

Charlie and Lorna Belle Wagner. Photo courtesy of Caymus.

“My grandpa had always made home wine, and people had told him that his home wine was really good and that he should sell it,” said the current Charlie Wagner, Chuck’s son. “Well, he basically was at the point of frustration with Napa and the path of their life after Prohibition, that he was going to sell the ranch and move to Australia with my grandma. My dad was a teenager. They said, ‘when you get out, when you graduate high school, we're considering moving unless you want to start a family winery with us.”

So, Caymus Vineyards is born in 1969. Named after “Rancho Caymus,” an old Mexican land grant that sounded dignified. This was no French château fantasy; just a family with dirt under their fingernails and the conviction that what they were bottling was worth a second glass.

And here’s the thing: they were right.

Caymus Vineyards. Photo courtesy of Caymus

That first Cabernet was a revelation—dark, rich, and unapologetic. Not Bordeaux-light, not something you’d squirrel away for decades waiting for tannins to soften like an old shoe. No. This was wine with shoulders on it, wine that walks into the room wearing cowboy boots and a good sport coat, pouring itself a drink, and immediately flirting with your date. It’s American wine — confident, democratic, full of charm, and entirely unwilling to apologize for being delicious.

Word spreads. Those normally trained to sneer at anything lacking a French accent admit that Caymus is the real deal. And then, three years later, comes Special Selection, which was like finding out that Sinatra had a better voice that he only used on weekends. Made only in the best years from the estate's best parcels, it’s named Wine of the Year by Wine Spectator – twice. Yes, twice. That’s something no one else has managed. Except Caymus. That’s not luck, that’s mastery.

But don’t mistake Caymus for a cloistered temple of wine snobbery. This isn’t the kind of place where a guy in a cravat lectures you about tannic structure while charging your AmEx to the breaking point. Caymus has always been a family winery, run by people who remember pruning vines at dawn. Yes, they make some of the most celebrated Cabernet on earth, but they do it with the plainspoken ethos of farmers who have impeccable taste.

This explains Conundrum. Initially offered as a white blend, it’s now offered as a red blend as well. Its name stems from the fact that it’s not a single varietal and features grapes that typically would never be blended. “So the original blend was Sauvignon Blanc, Simeon that’s found in Bordeaux, Chardonnay that's found in Burgundy, Muscat that's found in Italy and parts of France,” Wagner said. “And it was just a conundrum; kind of a why would you do that?” But he adds, “It’s a crowd pleaser.”

Caymus Vineyards. Photo courtesy of Caymus

Especially since it costs between $15 and $20 a bottle. Caymus Cabernet doesn’t ask you to genuflect before the gods of Bordeaux. It just says: Here I am. Pour me.

Then there’s Mer Soleil. “That's only Chardonnay. We have one,” he said.

“We have a ranch down in Monterey County, about a half hour from Carmel, where we grow a Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. We are always experimenting with stuff that a lot of the time, the neighbors have never heard of because they're obscure,” Wagner said. The results gets bottled under different names.

This year’s harvest has started, and will run through early November. Wagner says they taste everything that’s fermented that year in a single week. They’ll taste 180-200 wines, rating them on a 100-point scale. He admits, it’s a grueling week. “It's six of us total who do that; two guys from the cellar, one gal from the vineyard, my sister, my dad and I. And if they're under 90 points, they never go into barrel. We don't waste our time trying to make the wine taste good when it’s already flawed. So, we're losing a little bit monetarily by not bottling some of these wines after all that work that went into them. But also, we're not compromising the integrity of what the core business is.”

So here’s the toast: To the Wagners, who ended up changing Napa forever. After all, life’s too short for boring cars, bad jazz, or wine that tastes like homework. And while you’re at it, raise a glass to the fact that sometimes, in America, the walnut farmers turn out to be the kings of Cabernet.