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Heitz Cellar, Burgess Cellars, Stony Hill Vineyard: Wine lovers know these venerable estates helped establish Napa Valley’s reputation as California’s premier wine region. Today, they form the core of Lawrence Wine Estates, a company founded in 2020 to house the growing wine empire headed by Gaylon Lawrence Jr. and <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/the-wine-industry-is-overwhelmingly-white-now-the-push-for-inclusivity-is-gaining-momentum/2020/06/26/ccd898b0-b6f0-11ea-a8da-693df3d7674a_story.html" target="_blank">Carlton McCoy</a>.

McCoy should also be a familiar name: The D.C. native became a <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/food/a-master-who-commands-attention/2013/06/17/ec09d24a-d30d-11e2-a73e-826d299ff459_story.html" target=_blank>master sommelier</a>, the profession’s highest rank, in 2013 and led the wine program at the Little Nell in Aspen, Colo., for several years. Lawrence heads Lawrence Family, a collection of businesses, mostly in agriculture and banking, primarily in the Midwest and South.

Lawrence expanded his agricultural holdings to Napa Valley in 2018, when he purchased Heitz Cellar from the family of the late Joe Heitz and put McCoy in charge. Now based in St. Helena as CEO and co-founder of Lawrence Wine Estates, McCoy directs an expanding portfolio that includes six Napa Valley wineries. In late 2022, Lawrence and McCoy expanded their holdings to France, buying a majority share in Château Lascombes, a prominent winery in Bordeaux’s Margaux appellation.

A wealthy businessman collecting wineries is not a novelty in Napa — or elsewhere in California. But the lineup in Lawrence Wine Estates shows a keen sense of history. Heitz Cellar, founded in 1961, was the first winery to bottle a vineyard-designated cabernet sauvignon, the famous Heitz Martha’s Vineyard. Stony Hill, founded in 1952, became a wine geek’s idol for its chardonnay and riesling, adding cabernet sauvignon later. Burgess Cellars was founded in 1972 on the site of the old Souverain Cellars, which had been an incubator for several of Napa’s most prominent winemakers of the 1960s and 1970s. When Haynes Vineyard, the first planted in the Coombsville area of eastern Napa Valley, came up for sale, McCoy and Lawrence snapped it up and created a wine brand for it. They spun Ink Grade, a historic vineyard atop Howell Mountain, off from Heitz Cellar and made it an independent brand.

“These were family-owned, historically significant estates that helped make Napa’s reputation in the 1960s and 1970s,” McCoy said in a recent interview. “They never sold to large corporations, and they never succumbed to the style that became trendy in the ’90s when people would reverse-engineer a wine to get a high point score,” he added. That style featured high-extract wines with alcohol levels frequently exceeding 15 percent.

“There was a period of about 20 to 25 years when these wineries were not rewarded by critics for making these long-lived classical wines that are still fresh to this day, while the popular wines from the ’90s are dead in the glass,” McCoy said.

Dave Kotinsky

“I don’t think we’re creating something new, but we’re building an enterprise that can gain strength in numbers, instead of being the funky old winery nobody pays attention to,” he explained. That strength includes new investment in winery facilities, equipment and vineyards.

Lawrence Wine Estates practices biodynamic and regenerative viticulture at each of its properties, McCoy said.

Unfortunately, preserving the classical cabernet style of old can’t bring back that era’s prices, given the cost of land, labor and equipment in Napa Valley, as well as the need to comply with all sorts of regulations imposed over the past few decades.

“It’s very difficult to make quality wine for under $60 in Napa today,” McCoy said.

McCoy said that he and Lawrence are fans of Bordeaux wines, so when Château Lascombes was for sale, they saw an opportunity to expand overseas. “We saw a great chateau that was not living up to its full potential. It’s called the Sleeping Beauty of Margaux,” McCoy said.

After the purchase, Lawrence Wine Estates invested in the vineyards and the winery, employing small-lot fermentation to boost control and reducing vineyard size to focus on the best-quality vines. As an even greater sign of the desire to increase quality at Lascombes, McCoy hired Axel Heinz, who had made Italy’s famous Super Tuscan wines at Ornellaia and Masseto, to helm the estate.

To give their growing portfolio of wineries a dedicated sales team, McCoy and Lawrence created Demeine Estates as a distribution and import company. This had two advantages: “Our winemakers could focus on making wine instead of selling it, and I could reconnect to my sommelier ties with European wineries,” McCoy said. They’ve built a modestly sized but impressive portfolio, including champagne houses Philipponnat and Legras &amp; Haas, Burgundy’s Domaine de Montille, and several wineries from Tuscany’s Mazzei family, which, McCoy is quick to point out, “have been making wine longer than we’ve been a country.”

Like the Napa wineries, there’s a common thread: family-owned producers with a tradition of quality bucking fashion and market trends.

And one other thing: “These are wines we like to drink,” McCoy said.

Dave McIntyre writes about wine weekly. He also blogs at <a href="http://dmwineline.com">dmwineline.com</a>.

Dave McIntyre

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