ST. HELENA, CA. — He’s a busy guy, winemaker Philippe Melka. He’s on the fast track now, a dozen years after landing in the Napa Valley a virtual unknown. Bryant Family, Dalla Valle and Lail . . . these are just a few of his clients from the list of who’s who in Napa wine.
Food & Wine magazine named him Winemaker of the Year when it came out with its annual American Wine Awards in October, no small irony considering Melka is Bordeaux born and bred. But the soft-spoken Frenchman has earned the accolades, which no one should doubt. And now he can pick and choose, taking the projects he finds appealing and shunning those he doesn’t.
So I was intrigued when I discovered Melka was making a new Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon from a start-up winery called Parallel. The Parallel Cab’s debut vintage was 2003. I tasted it for the first time on a visit to San Francisco last year, when I was told of the Melka connection. Loved it, but I held my breath, expecting a formidable price tag.
I was slightly surprised to learn it was a reasonable $44. Not cheap, but nothing close to what I expected. A hundred bucks or more for a debut release from a Napa Valley producer with a rock-star winemaker would hardly have been shocking. This piqued my curiosity.
I caught up with Melka last week in the cellars of a custom-crush facility over on Spring Mountain, where the Parallel wines are made. I knew by that time that Parallel was owned by eight partners from Park City, Utah. Four couples, ski buddies who had known each other for years, decided one day to purchase land in the Napa Valley and make wine. This is a familiar story line in wine country, but with a twist. The Parallel partners weren’t on an ego trip, weren’t looking to build a mansion, nor a monument to themselves.
Just wanted to make good wine and have a Napa hangout for cozy weekend escapes. They hooked up with Melka in 2002 and he helped them find a property up on Howell Mountain, about seven miles off the Silverado Trail.
“I wasn’t so busy in 2002 as I am today,” he told me, basking in the moment as he tasted barrel samples of newly minted wines from the ’06 harvest. “But I also really liked the idea for this project. It is very humble in some ways. The partners wanted to make an above-average Napa Valley wine, but with an average Napa Valley price.
“If they had told me ‘We want you to make the best wine in the world, money is no object,’ I wouldn’t have been interested. What they wanted to do was make the best wine we could make from the grape sources we have. A wine all of the partners could enjoy and a wine that would be easy to sell. It is a wonderful concept.”
Of course, Philippe Melka being Philippe Melka, there is nothing average about the Parallel Cabernet. The first two vintages — sourced from mountain vineyards on the eastern side of the Napa Valley — are stunning wines (find the WRO reviews using the Wine Search function in the Wine Review Archives). They were made in limited quantity — the 2004 vintage is 900-plus cases — and could easily fetch a heftier price.
I suspect that will be coming soon, after the estate vineyards come online, but for now Parallel Cabernet Sauvignon is perhaps the steal of the decade in Napa Valley Cab, and an unpretentious story to boot.
Photos: Top, Philippe Melka tastes a barrel sample from Parallel’s 2006 vintage; bottom, a view of Parallel’s hillside vineyards off the Silverado Trail in the Napa Valley.
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