If you wake up under the brilliant, blue Howell Mountain sky on a bright summer morning, you'll look down on a valley filled with plumes of what looks like light-gray cotton candy - a thick layer of morning fog. "Just above the fog" seems to be the motto of the AVA, and the fog line, at about 1400 feet above sea level, marks the beginning of the appellation. This is a region with a long-standing reputation for reds, in particular, and it finally received official recognition as an AVA in 1983, making it the first sub-appellation to be identified within the Napa Valley AVA.

Howell Mountain has a rich wine history, in fact there were more producing vines (mainly Zinfandel) in the region in the late 1800s than there are now. Many vintners planted there, originally, to escape the phylloxera problem on the valley floor, and soon learned that their Howell Mountain plantings produced wines of outstanding quality. The prestigious Paris World Competition of 1889 put the region on the map when one of the wines won a bronze medal and, later, other wines of the region went on to win gold and bronze medals. The local newspaper predicted that Howell Mountain "would be to California what Medoc is to France." Unfortunately, these wineries were destined to become "ghost wineries" and were abandoned during prohibition. Today, the phrase "Howell Mountain Cabernet" brings to mind a wine of tremendous flavor concentration and firm structure - a wine for the cellar.

LOCATION
Howell Mountain is located northeast of the town of St. Helena, between the Napa Valley floor, to the west, and Pope Valley, to the east. There are 14,000 acres within the Howell Mountain AVA, although fewer than 600 acres are currently planted, a tiny fraction of the 44,671 acres planted to vines in all of Napa Valley.

Historian Charles Sullivan called Howell Mountain "A giant volcanic knob that weathered into a huge plateau looking down on the Napa Valley." An aerial view of Howell Mountain reveals only a few steep slopes (one of which is the home of our vineyard on Howell Mountain), despite the name. As Sullivan says, it's more of a plateau covered with evergreens and a few vineyards carved out.