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Wine Description
The Story
BLUELINE VINEYARD: After a few years, Jeff was struck with another irrepressible thought; would it be possible to find another site as special as the Hourglass Vineyard? It was a long shot at best. The valley was small and no longer the blank canvas his father had introduced to the visionaries of the 60s and 70s; the most coveted land was mostly accounted for. Jeff and his wife Carolyn searched in vain for several years and decided if it were meant to be, fate would eventually intervene.
One Sunday afternoon in December 2005, as Jeff drove south of Calistoga on Silverado Trail, a “For Sale” sign happened to catch his eye. Here, at the mouth of the Dutch Henry Canyon, in the neighborhood of Switchback Ridge and Duckhorn’s famed Three Palms Vineyard, a dramatic parcel of land sat waiting to be discovered. He pulled over to scan the site: two meandering “blue-line” streams framed the property and large piles of river rock punctuated the vines—the traces of thousand-year-old riverbeds. Jeff gazed up to the site’s dramatic backdrop: Two canyons had folded together three million years ago to form this section of the Vaca mountains, its streams scattering fractured bedrock throughout the pedigreed vineyards all around him. He grinned in Kliewer-like fashion.
The two ancient riverbeds, the "blue-lines", had blessed the site with remarkable soils and the coupled canyons brought an ideal climate to this nook of farmland. Jeff and Carolyn enticed their friends Richard and Maureen Chilton, and Michael and Pam Clark to join them in the next chapter of Hourglass, purchasing the vineyard in partnership. They named the 20-acre vineyard Blueline and strategically replanted it. Once the vines came of age in 2012, with a new winery built on the site, they had all the elements in place to become a self-sufficient estate winery.
With 24 acres across two estates, planted to all five red Bordeaux varieties, it was time to employ a full-time winemaker, someone to focus on the myriad granular details, the seemingly inconsequential minutiae that ultimately determine the finished wine. Bob Foley’s eponymous label and numerous consulting projects didn’t afford him the time to take on this intensified role. It was time to take Hourglass to a new level and, fortunately, there was another experimentalist in the valley excited to step in. Tony Biagi possessed the vision, expertise and artistry to build upon the legacy that Bob Foley started
