Roam

Greetings from Napa Valley. After many years in the making we are so pleased to offer you the Inaugural Release of ROAM. Our wine brand identity uses my middle name, and also speaks to the commitment to never stop exploring the Napa Valley in my quest to create pure single-vineyard wines.

     Our 2015 ROAM Sleeping Lady Cabernet Sauvignon represents the culmination of finding an ideal single vineyard to debut and to share with friends around the world. This wine embodies our sensory values of ethereal floral aromatics, sculptural palate weight, vibrant red-fruit flavors and depth of classic layered finesse.

The Sleeping Lady Vineyard, located near the village of Yountville, on the gentle up-slope of the western Mayacamas foothills, is simply magical. We are grateful to have approximately a 2-acre holding within Sleeping Lady.  After intimately studying the flavor variations between each of our contiguous vine row blocks, we have blended our best barrels to share with you now. 

As a protégé of the Paulliac-born winemaker, the late Denis Malbec, I wanted to create a single wine of sheer beauty, complexity, and ageability in line with great Napa Valley wines and Bordeaux First-Growth wines that my mentor had crafted during his career. Just as importantly, I wanted to make a debut wine that reminded me of some of the iconic early 1900's classic Napa Valley bottlings I had tasted growing up here. It is with immense gratitude that I believe the Sleeping Lady Cabernet Sauvignon inside of each bottle we are releasing today would make my mentor proud.

At ROAM we are grateful to conduct all of our winemaking, barrel aging and hospitality activities within the estate of Wheeler Farms Winery, the realized vision of our friends Bart and Daphne Araujo, located in my home town of St. Helena. It is a dream come true to craft vinous gems within a compound that is literally designed to give us the freedom to embrace tradition and experimentation in ways I had never previously imagined.