A meteoric rise Meteor Vineyard debuts eastside cab

By LOUISA HUFSTADER
Register Correspondent

A patch of former cattle land in east Napa has been turning out some of the valley’s most-prized cabernet sauvignon grapes since 2002. The 22-acre Meteor Vineyard, planted in 1999 by Barry and Tracy Schuler, sells fruit to well-respected wineries like Etude, Vineyard 29 and Arietta.

Now, Meteor Vineyard has its own label: The Schulers have partnered with famed winemaking couple Bill and Dawnine Dyer of Calistoga to create a single-vineyard cab that saw its first public release this spring.

“I really just wanted to grow great fruit,” said Barry Schuler, the technology pioneer and former CEO of America Online. “And that happened.”

Schuler still remembers the first time he visited the Napa Valley, as a young man from a working-class family in New Jersey.

As he drove into the valley and the view opened up before him, “it was like a lightning bolt,” Schuler recalled.

“I thought, ‘This is the most amazing place in the world. I have to live here. I have to grow grapes.’

“It took another 25-30 years, but here we are,” continued Schuler, who, with his wife and another couple, co-founded Napa’s Blue Oak School after settling here a decade ago. He also advises the New Technology Foundation and is a popular speaker.

Meteor Vineyard is named for a technology business the Schulers co-founded in 1990: Medior was a play on the words “media” and “meteor,” and more importantly, it was one of the earliest players in making the Internet interactive. Selling the company to AOL was the first step in financing the Schulers’ move to Napa.

Making their own wine was never part of the plan; the “Half-century Reserve” the Dyers created for Barry’s 50th birthday in 2003 was supposed to be a one-off tribute to a man who had realized his dream of growing great grapes in Napa.

Then friends and family tasted the birthday wine, and there was “an incredible response,” Tracy Schuler said. “That ’03 vintage got a lot of attention among our friends,” who clamored for more.

“The land and the wine told us we should go do this,” said her husband. “We’re really excited about the results.”

Hands-on partners

Instead of what he called “the standard hire-a-consultant” route to developing the Meteor brand, the Schulers wanted full partners: The Dyers own 50 percent of the business, and their collaboration is both hands-on and intellectual.

“Bill and Dawnine have really come to understand the land and let it do its thing,” said Barry Schuler, who called their Meteor wine “a pure expression of the single property, that was underwater and somehow got thrust up 500 feet, probably some time when Mt. George popped its cork.

“We’re first to bud break, last to harvest, there’s no mad scramble at the end — and it’s showing in the wine,” he said.

“It’s a pretty spectacular place for cabernet,” said Dawnine Dyer, former head winemaker at Domaine Chandon and co-proprietor, with her husband, of Dyer Vineyard on Diamond Mountain.

Tracy Schuler credits vineyard manager Michael Wolf with getting the most out of the property, which sits on a Coombsville knoll where the Schuler family has made its home for the past 10 years.

“He cared for this vineyard. It really was a passion project for him,” she said.

Wolf and the Schulers knew the former pastureland had cab potential for a number of reasons, she continued: The knoll itself is “a little mountain of cobblestones,” washed by long-ago seas in the eons before it was upthrust in some ancient eruption.

“The drainage is pretty phenomenal, and the soil is volcanic with just a little bit of clay,” while the climate is consistently cooler than locations further from San Pablo Bay.

The site’s elevation, up to 500 feet above sea level, keeps Meteor grapes above the fog, while its eastern location, overlooked by nearby Mt. George and ringed with farther hills, is out of the wind, Schuler said.

 “It is enough cooler than farther upvalley that we seem to be able to ride the heat spikes and we don’t have much trouble with sunburn,” she added.

While Wolf cares for the grapes, the Dyers spend plenty of time among the vines – as do winemakers from the other companies that continue to buy Meteor grapes, acting as a kind of brain trust for the partners.

“The best wines, I think, are made in the vineyard,” said Dawnine Dyer, who finds in the Meteor grapes a combination of two strengths: Bright, explosive fruit flavors – “always blackberry, sometimes currant” – balanced with underlying structure from the site’s high-and-dry soils.

After the 2003 birthday wine and an exploratory 2004, the partners have bottled about 700 cases of their first public release, the 2005 Meteor Vineyard cabernet sauvignon ($225), which they are selling first to members of their mailing list.

Meteor debuted its 2006 at this year’s Premiere Napa Valley auction, where Register wine eminence L. Pierce Carson described it as “a real winner” and “an elegant wine proffering a mouthful of ripe blackberries that ends in a lingering finish.”

Barry Schuler promises even better things with the 2007 Meteor, which he said is already “blowing us away — right in the league with some of the best stuff coming out of the valley.”

Meteor Vineyard is not open to the public; for information, visit www.meteorvineyard.com or http://studio-707.com/news/Meteor _media.php.

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