Whitehall Lane Winery

There are generally two ways of creating a "reserve" wine. One common way is to focus on using the best grapes from a particular vineyard. This method of creating a wine better than all others is growing in favor. But then there is the method that is adopted by many others which one winery, Whitehall Lane in Napa Valley, seems to have perfected: Simply using the best grapes at your disposal no matter what vineyard they come from.

By taking this more laissez-faire approach to producing the best wine they can, Whitehall Lane has produced a “reserve” wine that has regularly been honored as among the best in the world year after year. Wine Spectator Magazine twice has placed the Whitehall Reserve Cabernet in their Top Ten Wines in the World. Wine & Spirits Magazine and Quarterly Review of Wine both named their reserve wine their Top Wine of the Year. This Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is almost always rated 90 points or above by anyone who tastes it.

Clearly there is something to the laissez-fair approach to making a reserve wine.

At Whitehall Lane the process is fairly straightforward: find the best barreled lots of Cabernet and other Bordeaux varietals and blend them together in a complimentary way. Most years, the grapes come from the winery’s Leonardini and Morisoli vineyards. One doubts that the winery is surprised these vineyards usually yield the barrels that go into the Reserve Cabernet since the Leonardini family is quite familiar with where their finest grapes come from.

But it’s really not only a matter of going back to the same source over and over again and finding what they expect. This method of blending barrels is an artistic endeavor. It is much like having a palate of colors and mixing together different ones to get just the right hue. This method is also somewhat more intellectually demanding than the single-vineyard approach to making “Reserve” wines. There are usually far more barrels to examine when taking the artistic approach than taking the “Single Vineyard” or “The-Best-Rows-in-a-Vineyard” approach to producing a reserve wine.

All that said, Whitehall Lane’s famed Limited Reserve Cabernet bottlings are almost always made with a good deal of wine produced from grapes grown in its Leonardini Vineyard. Located in the St. Helena appellation, the plot of land has been home to grapes since the 1880s. The 14-acre vineyard is planted mainly with Cabernet and a bit of Merlot thrown in. The Wine Spectator Magazine called Leonardini the vineyard best representative of the St. Helena appellation.

There are different ways to get to a “reserve” designation. Whitehall Lane demonstrates that the artistic path to reserve remains among the best methods.  

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This vendor is located at 2545 Napa Valley Corporate Drive, Napa, CA, 94558.