Ashes & Diamonds Winery
Napa as it tasted between the mid-fifties and the end of the seventies, made by Steve Matthiasson and Diana Snowden Seysses. Four wines for $60, daily, in a mid-century room off Howard Lane.
Why go
Kashy Khaledi was running promos and music video production out of the Capitol Records tower when he decided to leave, and he named the winery after a 1958 Polish film he kept coming back to.2 What he wanted was the Napa of the mid-century through the end of the 1970s, so he built the project the way the Case Study Houses were built, by commissioning people and letting them work.2 Steve Matthiasson came in early and opened the vineyard sources; Dan Petroski made the first vintages and handed over to Diana Snowden Seysses just after the 2015 harvest.2 Snowden Seysses ferments on native yeast and argues the diversity is what makes the wine last: the more diversity you have in the population of yeast at harvest time, the longer that wine will live and the more complex it will be.
2
Order this / avoid
- Order: A&D Wines, four wines for $60, 60 to 75 minutes. It is the flight that shows the range.1
- Order: the Teaser at $45 if you have three more appointments that day. Three wines, under an hour.1
- Avoid: turning up after five. The room closes at 6:30 and the last reservation is at 5:00.1
What locals & experts say
- Diana Snowden Seysses, winemaker, in the Robert Parker Wine Journal:
It takes a very different approach to minimize the mark of your hand and to maximize the expression of the land. I think that farming is absolutely the most crucial element in site-specific wines.
That is the winemaker on her own method.2 - Bart Araujo, who sells the winery fruit, on Steve Matthiasson:
He has dirt under his fingernails; he's a real farmer, and he drives his own tractor and all that, but he's also an academic, a practical academic. Some consultants you work with think only one step at a time, but Steve thinks three steps ahead of time.
2
Nobody in that piece scores a wine, and I found no critic's rating on a current bottle, so I have no tasting note of my own to give you.
Good to know
- Hours: open daily 11:00am to 6:30pm, last reservation at 5:00pm, booking on Tock.1
- Where: 4130 Howard Lane in the Oak Knoll District, on 707.666.4777.1
- Hygiene: not established. No inspection instrument for this county is on file here.
Verdict
could-visit — Kashy Khaledi left a job at Capitol Records to build a winery that tastes like Napa did between the mid-fifties and the end of the seventies, and he hired Steve Matthiasson, Dan Petroski and then Diana Snowden Seysses to do it, which is a serious bench for a house founded on a film reference. Snowden Seysses works native yeast and says the aim is 'to minimize the mark of your hand and to maximize the expression of the land'. She is describing her method. Nothing read here scores a bottle, and the whole case rests on one long profile plus the winery's own page. At $45 for three wines and $60 for four, in a mid-century room open daily until 6:30, the risk of finding out is low.