Wine-wise North Bay biz readers have voted Turnbull Wine Cellars’ cabernet as the Best Cabernet for 2023. This award, while impressive, invites a question: In a region known for its wine—where you’d really have to search to find one that’s not good—what does it mean to be “best?” According to Peter Heitz, Turnbull’s winemaker, it’s easy to tell good wine from the bad, but exceptional wine is something else. “The difference between good wine and exceptional wine,” he says, “is about transporting somebody to a place in time.” For place, both the Napa Valley and Turnbull’s estate vineyards in Oakville are great. As for time, great times can happen any time, but time, in wine as well as chance, favors the prepared. So a Turnbull cabernet that reaches the extraordinary is both expected and celebrated. “When you have a great vintage or an exceptional vineyard and those come together at the same moment,” he says, “then you’ve got something special.”
Turnbull Wine Cellars values longevity. Heitz, who has been Turnbull’s winemaker for 16 vintages so far, may be one of the “junior” members of the Turnbull team––some of the staff have worked there for 25 and 30 vintages. Heitz comes from four generations of winemakers in Napa Valley, with extended winemaking ancestry going back 10 generations in Alsace, France. Proud to call himself a farmer, you could say he makes his wines from soil to glass.
“We’re not outsourcing fruit, although you can make great wines that way,” he says. But at Turnbull, they own the process. “We are the farmer. And the maker. And so, we have kind of a leg up.” He likes to give the credit to the grapes. “The idea of winemaker is a bit of a misnomer,” says the winemaker. “The best wines aren’t made. They happen from place and time.”
He explains that while there are fine winemakers who, through their knowledge and experience and technique, can make a good wine out of not-so-good grapes, the resulting wine may not have that mysterious quality that happens when the magic in the soil and the weather and how the vines were planted and tended all comes together. Then the winemaker, like a conductor, raises a baton and brings it all together into an experience in a glass that takes someone back someplace, to a special place and time. That’s what he strives for: That extra layer of experience that we remember—that comes back to us when we pour a glass of Turnbull cabernet.
Turnbullwines.com
