Corison Winery

Corison Winery is a small family farm producing delicious Cabernet Sauvignons that speak of place. Over three decades, Cathy Corison and William Martin have built a special home to celebrate the best of our little corner of the world, benchland in the heart of the Napa Valley. Known for power and elegance, Corison wines are balanced to grace the table and are recognized throughout the world for their longevity and consistency.

In 1987, Cathy Corison began to purchase great Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from prime benchland vineyards between Rutherford and St. Helena, intent on making powerful and elegant Cabernet Sauvignon that speaks of place. These well-drained alluvial soils had a long history of producing balanced, age-worthy, world-class wines, reaching back to the late 19th century. In her early years everything was done with smoke and mirrors, using purchased fruit and space in others’ wineries.

In 1995, with the purchase of Kronos Vineyard, a property that had been a farm for over a century, there was finally an estate vineyard and a place to build a winery. In the spring of 1999 we broke ground to build our stately Victorian-style winery barn, designed by Cathy’s husband, William Martin. Our second estate vineyard, Sunbasket, a stone’s throw from the winery, was purchased in 2015 after sourcing it for over 25 years.

The images on the Corison labels are inspired by old life symbols based on rain and a sprouting seed. They embellished vases excavated from the site of one of the earliest European cultures to cultivate grapes and make wine over 7,000 years ago.

Cathy Corison – Winemaker, Founding Partner

Cathy’s winemaking journey began nearly 45 years ago when she took a wine appreciation course at Pomona College on a complete whim. She fell in love with wine for all the usual reasons, but, as a Biology major, was also taken by the fact that wine is the result of a fascinating collaboration among a series of living systems. Two years later she graduated, and two days after that, arrived in the Napa Valley, bent on making wine. A master’s degree in Enology at UC Davis followed, and then a harvest internship at Freemark Abbey in 1978. Winemaking positions included Yverdon in 1979-1980 and then Chappellet Vineyard for the 1980’s. In 1987, toward the end of her tenure at Chappellet, there was a wine inside her that needed to get out and she began to buy grapes and barrels (instead of cars and houses). Using other wineries’ excess capacity while continuing to moonlight at Staglin, York Creek and Long Meadow Ranch, Corison Winery was born.

William Martin, Partner

Cathy’s husband, William, grew up in upstate New York working at his grandfather’s lumberyard and, using both sides of his brain, majored in Art & Physics at Middlebury College in Vermont. After several years in Boston working for an architect and cultivating his passion for food and wine, he met Cathy in 1990. They married two years later and William moved to the Napa Valley, just in time to help with the 1992 harvest. He soon brought Corison Winery into the digital age with its first computer, and remains the IT and Accounting departments to this day. A man with a long view, he searched for a vineyard and winery site and then orchestrated the purchase of Kronos Vineyard in 1995. He designed the winery barn and the classic landscaping and then built a model of the barn and shepherded us through the arduous use permit process. We broke ground in 1999, building a winemaking home at long last. With a combination of instinct and serendipity, he found five majestic palm trees in 2014 at a nearby jobsite and had them moved to grace our driveway and the Victorian vineyard house. His next big project was the masterful renovation of the old house, originally built in 1898, which has since been rechristened the Palm House. Most recently, he negotiated the purchase of Sunbasket Vineyard, a favorite vineyard that Corison Winery had sourced for nearly 30 years, and negotiated a long term lease on another adjacent vineyard. Other duties include forklift driver, grape hauler, crush hand and the thankless task of managing bottling.

Since 1987, the Corison Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon has been sourced from three benchland vineyards located between Rutherford and St. Helena. In 2019 we harvested our 33rd vintage! “Bench” is grape-growing jargon for the alluvial fans emanating from the western hills. All three vineyards grow on Bale gravelly loam, the soils that put Napa Valley on the map. Loam holds enough water for the vines to grow through the spring and into early summer, but abundant gravel and cobbles allow the soil to drain well so that the vines run out of water at veraison, which marks the beginning of the ripening season. At veraison the grapes soften and the vines get busy, accumulating sugar and developing inky color and complex, red, blue, purple and black fruit flavors. The goal is to reach ripeness before sugars get too high, yielding delicious, balanced wine with moderate alcohol.

Kronos Vineyard

Kronos was one of the titans in Greek mythology, the sons of heaven and earth. That is right where wine sits for Cathy, between earth and sky. Located by William Martin and purchased in 1995, Kronos Vineyard is one of the last old Cabernet vineyards in the Napa Valley. Planted in 1971 on St. George rootstock, which is completely resistant to Phylloxera, the gnarly, wise old ladies are almost 50 years old! Yields are pitifully low at 1.25 tons/acre, but the singular wine it produces proves it to be one of the great Cabernet vineyards of the world. Cathy considers it a gift to have the opportunity to work with these old vines because they yield concentrated, complex, inky, structured, aromatic wines at very moderate alcohols. Farmed sustainably from the beginning, these deep-rooted veterans sail through any weather.

Sunbasket Vineyard

Corison Winery has sourced Sunbasket Vineyard for over 25 years, sharing it with Shafer Vineyards for many years until they became an exclusively estate winery over 10 years ago. Since then, Corison has taken all the fruit. Cathy has long valued Sunbasket for its bright red and blue fruit and pretty aromatics. Serendipity, and William Martin’s hard work, allowed us to buy it in 2015, adding it to our estate. The first thing we did was to convert it to sustainable farming methods. We were thrilled to release our first Sunbasket Vineyard wines in the fall of 2017!

Sunbasket Vineyard was originally planted in the early 1950’s by the legendary winemaker, André Tchelistcheff. Affectionately known as the ‘Maestro’, he influenced generations of Napa Valley winemakers. The vineyard is situated in sunny Saint Helena on the classic alluvial gravelly loam soils that are known as the ‘bench’. Referring to the exceptional amount of sunshine in this corner of the world, André called it a “sunbasket”. It is truly a great vineyard and we’re proud to continue as stewards of its distinguished heritage.

Cathy has long known that she can’t make a wine any better than the grapes that come into the winery at harvest, so all year she spends much of her time and energy out in the vineyards.

Cabernet Sauvignon makes powerful wine no matter where, or how, it grows. For Cathy, it is much more interesting at the intersection of power and elegance, seeming opposites. Careful canopy management, requiring meticulous handwork throughout the growing season, yields fully ripe fruit that retains snappy natural acidity at moderate sugars. Ample, velvety tannins give the wines gentle grip and, combined with good acidity, allow the wines to grace the table and enjoy remarkable longevity. 

Great grapes make great wine. Cathy’s winemaking is largely non-interventionist, with gentleness at every step. Everything she does is geared toward getting all the goodness out of the grapes and leaving anything undesirable behind. When fermentation is complete, the wines go down to small French oak barrels to spend the next 20 months undergoing the magical alchemy that is wine aging. We’re all in this together. Our mission at Corison Winery is to produce world-class Cabernet Sauvignon with integrity. With this intention, one of our founding principles is to minimize negative impacts on the environment.

Kronos Vineyard has been farmed sustainably for over twenty years, employing organic farming techniques, as has Sunbasket Vineyard since 2015. Compost and cover crops promote flourishing soils which, in turn, nourish the vines. We till to manage weeds and use no synthetic pesticides.

We employ nesting boxes in the vineyard to encourage obliging birds to take up residence. Bluebirds consume harmful insects, including leafhoppers and grasshoppers, and Barn Owls hunt four-legged varmints.

With water being one of our biggest challenges in California, we are nudging our vineyards toward dry farming, encouraging our mature vines to send roots deep into the soil. Kronos Vineyard grows on deeply-rooted St. George rootstock, which is known for its ability to be dry-farmed. State-of-the-art water stress sensors and drip-irrigation help us optimize this precious resource when the vines do need water.

Mindful of our carbon footprint, Cathy commutes to the winery and makes her vineyard rounds nearly gasoline- and emission-free in her plug-in hybrid, and the winery offers charging stations for visitors in electric cars. William built passive night-cooling into the design of the winery with the cool night air drawn in through louvers on the ground floor and warm air vented to the outside through classic cupolas on the roof. And behind the scenes, our goal of paperless administration is within sight.