New California Wine
By Matt Kramer

Carl Doumani has always owned exceptional vineyards and buildings. With his newly created Quixote, started in the late 1990's, he has done it again. Doumani first achived fame with his Stags' Leap Winery, a historic manor house and vineyard that dates to the 1880s. His Cabernet Sauvignon from that estate was always exceptional, although it was over-shadowed by neighbor and archrival Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.

Doumani is a Napa Valley original, a charming, artistic soul who has little interest in, or capacity for, the hail-fellow-well-met clubbiness of Napa Valley. (Really, he should have been in the more idiosyncratic Santa Cruz Mountains.)

When Doumani sold Stags' Leap Winery in 1997 (for a reported $17 million) to what is now Beringer Blass, he retained about 150 acres of adjoining land, which now holds twenty-seven acres of vines, mostly his beloved Petite Sirah and Cabernet Sauvignon, along with other Bordeaux-type vines for blending purposes. Two wines are issued, both propreitary named: Quixote, which is a blend of Petite Sirah and Cabernet, and Panza, a less expensive Cabernet Sauvignon. The first wines appeared in the 1999 vintage.

So far, both wines are very well made and promising. Since it's still early days, it's not quite fair to render judgement on them yet, except to say that the wines are rewarding drinking.

Any discussion of Quixote winery is not complete without mention of Doumani's extraordinary winery facility, a phantasmagoric structure created by the late Friedensreich Hundertwasser, featuring a gold-leaf onion dome and a swirl of fractured tiles both inside and out. It is, without question, the most original winery in Napa Valley and its most delightful, too. Would that more winery owners shared Doumani's simultaneous irreverence and seriousness of purpose.