July 2025 – Power Tasting – The Wine Tasting Experience

Heitz Cellar

In thinking about Heitz Cellar, our memories break down into two periods: when Joe Heitz was alive and afterwards. Let us be clear that in both periods to vineyards produced world-renowned wines, particularly their Cabernet Sauvignons. But the wine tasting experience became very different once Joe passed away.

Heitz – the winery and the man – are true pioneers of Napa Valley winemaking. He founded the winery in 1961. To put that in perspective, that was 15 years before the famous Judgment of Paris put California wines on the oenological map. Heitz Cellar’s 1970 Cabernet Sauvignon was one of the American wines tasted on that historic occasion.

For most of its existence, the Heitz tasting room was an unassuming, sparsely furnished stone building on Route 29 in St. Helena. The winery was generous in pouring many of their best wines, including the most famous one, the Martha’s Vineyard. Joe Heitz believed that wine was for sharing and so tasting at his winery were free. That remained the case until Joe’s heirs sold the winery to the Lawrence family in 2018. But Joe lives on, on the Heitz Cellar labels, checking out his wines in the aging room.

The old Heitz Cellar winery, circa 1990. Photo courtesy of Wine Spectator.

The Heitz winery today has been rebuilt as a sleek building and tasting room, not a Napa Palace but a long way from two barrels and a plank. As is the case everywhere in Napa Valley, the tastings are sit-down affairs and there is a fee, one consistent with other top-end vineyards in the region. Tastings are available at the original location, now called the Salon, and in the Vaca Mountain foothills, at what they term the Estate.

Tasting at Heitz’s Salon. Photo courtesy of the winery.

The wines available for tasting lean heavily towards the Cabernet Sauvignons that made Heitz so well-known. Martha’s Vineyard is still the flagship wine, and now has a picture of the old winery building on the label. (Sadly, a former favorite of ours, the Bella Oaks, is no longer made.) Some of what makes a visit to Heitz so exciting is that all their wines are sourced from single vineyards, so one can taste the regional variation in Napa Valley in the hands of a single winemaking team. Oh, yeah, they have some Chardonnays and a Rosé too. They’re not the reason to visit Heitz Cellar.

Power Tasting isn’t qualified to compare the wines the way Joe Heitz made them to those made with his name on the label today, but we can compare the experiences. Previously, visitors were made to feel like Joe’s guests, sharing in the bounty of his vineyards and his winemaking skill. The wines were and are powerful and elegant, but the experience was casual and down-to-earth.

A visit to Heitz Cellar today is more like dinner at a four-star restaurant. It’s classy and makes one feel special, but it’s removed from the earth the grapes grew in. (There is a vineyard tour available, so we guess that isn’t always the case.) Honestly, we preferred the old way, but those days are gone and we enjoy the way things are now.

A word about the name. It’s Heitz Cellar (singular) although we’ve always pluralized it. We don’t know any other singulars.

Big Sur

The Big Sur is a stretch of coastline running from the Carmel Valley in the north to the San Antonio Valley in the south. We mention these viticultural areas because we recommend that if you are ever on a wine tasting trip in these AVAs, or nearby as far as Paso Robles or Monterey, you should take some time to see this natural wonder.

Photo courtesy of See Monterey.

Of course, you wouldn’t be able to see if it weren’t for the man-made road, California Highway 1. That stretch offers some of the most stunning coastal vistas in the United States. The view of the Pacific with mountains on one side of the road and sheer cliffs on the other is overwhelming. At each turn of the highway, and there are many, there are vistas that no photograph can do justice to, much less words.

But Power Tasting is about wine tasting, with a monthly recommendation of Places to Visit while on a tasting trip. Big Sur is certainly one of them, but not after visiting any wineries. Highway 1 along the Big Sur has hardly any guardrails, due to the cliffside erosion. Drivers must keep their eyes on the road and not do more than glance at the scenery. Passengers get the most enjoyment, except in looking down those cliffs as they drive by.

Another problem with driving the Big Sur is that there have been some pretty bad landslides. We don’t think there’s too much risk of getting caught in one; the highway authorities take care of preventing cars from entering dangerous zones. But often – most recently in 2024 – landslides have closed large sections of the road to vehicular traffic. So at the present you can go south as far as Esalen and north as far as Lucia, but not in between.

Hearst Castle in San Simeon. Courtesy of California Beaches.

There are a few attractions on or near the Big Sur besides the vistas. The best known of them is Hearst Castle in San Simeon, near the southern extreme. It is the mighty pleasure dome erected by the newspaper publisher William Randoph Hearst. He inspired fear and derision in his time, which ended in 1951. He is best remembered now as the inspiration for the movie Citizen Kane. His mansion is a relic of a lost age of California wealth and folly, preceding the Silicon Valley excesses of our own time. Still, tourists flock to see it.

There is also the village of Big Sur, about 24 miles south of Carmel. In itself, it’s undistinguished. But it’s a place where people can park their cars and enjoy the view without having to drive. There’s access to hiking trails and to beaches. The latter are not really for bathing, being much to rocky. But we understand surfers like to do their thing near there. We once went to a dinner show in nearby Ventana and recommend it if you like amateur theatricals.

The Esalen Institute is along the Big Sur, if you want to have your spirits enlightened. And you can visit a museum dedicated to Henry Miller, if Lady Chatterley is to your taste. But really, the reason to go to the Big Sur is to take in the magnificent views. If you visit California for wine tasting, take a little time off to see Big Sur.

Advice to New Wine Tasters

A few issues back, Power Tasting gave advice on teaching new wine tasters about wine. We’d also like to advise on what to tell new wine tasters who are interested in going on a wine tasting trip if they ask for your input. A lot of them will want to go to Napa Valley, because that’s the American winemaking region best known to them.

Photo courtesy of Forbes.

Focus on the experience and not just the wines. If it were just about wine, they could stay home and open bottles. Take in the scenery, the scented air, the architecture, the little side roads, even the restaurants. For the first-timers, the trip should be more than an introduction to wine; it should also be an entry into what Robert Mondavi called the good life.
Take a winery tour. And maybe take it at the first place they visit. If in one stop they can see the vines, the winemaking facilities and taste the wines, they will get the full spectrum of wine: agriculture, industry and art. We, experienced tasters, get a bit blasé about winery tours; seen one and we’ve seen them all. If we give advice we should try to remember when we hadn’t seen one at all.
Try a lot of different types of wine. One of the advantages of tasting in Napa Valley is the existence of wines made from so many varietals. So if in visiting just a few wineries – and sipping, not gulping – they can experience Chardonnay next to Sauvignon Blanc; Cabernet Sauvignon next to Merlot next to Zinfandel next to Pinot Noir. That’s an education!
Show the server an interest in learning about wine. From a purely commercial perspective, it pays for the tasting room personnel to go out of their way to aid new tasters. Today’s young, innocent faces are tomorrow’s clientele. Beyond that, servers generally love wine and even if they’re not themselves educators, they probably know more about the subject than the new wine tasters in front of them. New visitors should urge their servers to share their knowledge.
Talk to each other about what they’re smelling and tasting. (We’re assuming that they’re not tasting solo, which introduces a lot of other issues.) Just because they’re inexperienced doesn’t mean that new wine tasters don’t have good sense…and good senses. Finding ways to express their sensual reactions will help them to solidify their learning. And it’s fun to stick their noses into a glass and find the words for what they smell. Talking about it is even better. One’s smell of strawberries are no better than another’s pencil box , but it does lead to some interesting conversations.

Discovering California Wine

Our very first wine tasting trip occurred in 1977, when we visited Napa Valley for the first time. By this point in our lives, we were wine enjoyers, not yet enthusiasts. Almost everything we drank was either French or Italian. Sure, we had some California wine, but it came in jugs and we served it at parties. We were too classy (meaning snobbish and uninformed) to drink American wine.

The iconic Robert Mondavi winery.

But then the newspapers became full of articles about a wine tasting in France that has come to be known as The Judgment of Paris. In May, 1976 California wines, mostly from Napa Valley, had competed side-by-side with the top tier of French wines and (amazing!) the American wines came out on top. So we started to buy some wines from California that came in regular wine bottles. But we didn’t know what to buy and even if we did, the distribution networks that exist today weren’t there in those days, so better California wines weren’t in our stores.

So the next year, when as luck would have it, we attended a conference in San Francisco, we took an extra day to voyage across the Bay Bridge and see what Napa Valley was all about. There were nowhere as many wineries in the valley as there are today. By this time, we had learned about a few of them and made sure to try the ones we’d heard of.

Memory is a bit foggy nearly a half century later. We know we went to Chandon. The bubbly wine that we tasted – we were warned not to call it Champagne – was wonderful! So much better than the plonk we were used to back home. And we went to Robert Mondavi, which was a revelation. It wasn’t just the wines, though they were amazing. It was the beauty of the architecture, the grounds and the vineyards that blew us away (and made us into wine tasters to this day).

And we’re sure we had a tasting at Louis M. Martini. Memory may be playing tricks, but we think we got to meet Mr. Martini himself on that occasion. It was definitely a simple operation, unlike the elegant tasting facilities at Martini today. Here were hearty, accessible wines that we could afford to buy. Their wines became a mainstay of our cellar (that was actually the bottom of the linen closet).

Without getting into a comparison of French, Italian and Californian wines, it is fair to say that in those early years of our wine-drinking lives, the quality difference at the price point we could afford in those days – five dollars was a lot – was pretty great. Decades of inflation and some improvement in our tastes make wine rather more expensive nowadays, and our cellar contains wine from more places. There will always be a place for California wines. Their power is unmistakable, both in terms of flavors and the amount of alcohol (although climate change is forcing the Europeans to bottle wines that are catching up to California in that regard). But in the 1970’s all we knew was we had discovered something new that opened taste vistas for us.