Retro Cellars Petite Sirah 2011

The Land

Howell Mountain was Napa's first mountain sub-appellation, approved in 1983, and its southern boundary was drawn at 1,400 feet because that is where the fog crests. Everything inside the AVA sits above the fog line, which inverts the usual Napa pattern. The valley floor spends its mornings cold and gray while Howell Mountain is already in full sun, then the mountain cools hard at night while the floor holds heat. Soils are shallow volcanic and poor, running from rust-red iron-rich clay to white compressed ash tuff, free-draining and low in fertility, so vines stay small and berries smaller. Retro Cellars farms between 1,800 and 2,100 feet. Thick-skinned Petite Sirah grown on ground this stingy produces fruit with an almost absurd skin-to-juice ratio.

The Wine

Petite Sirah is Durif, a Peloursin and Syrah cross, and it carries more anthocyanin and tannin per berry than nearly anything else in California. That is why a bottle like this is still upright at fifteen years: the tannin and pigment load is high enough that the wine spends a decade shedding structure before it starts trading primary fruit for tertiary. The 2011 season in Napa was cool from the start, with five inches of rain through May and June flowering that cut the crop, harvest about three weeks late, a heat spike in late September, two inches of October rain, then a mid-October Indian summer that brought the fruit in. The wines came in at lower alcohol with higher acid and were written off early. Retro's read on this one is nuance over power: rose petal, spice, green peppercorn, red and black fruit, a gunpowder edge, fine-grained tannin, a lifted finish.

The People

Retro Cellars was started in 2003 by Mike and Kara Dunn, whose families both put down roots in Napa in 1978. Mike's family founded Dunn Vineyards on Howell Mountain that year, Kara's family founded Pecota Winery in Calistoga the same year. The first Retro wine was a 2003 Petite Sirah, released in 2005, and Petite Sirah has stayed the core of the house since, alongside estate Syrah planted in 2012 and Zinfandel from Green and Red in Chiles Valley. Production stays under 500 cases a vintage. They describe themselves as farmers and caretakers rather than winemakers, and the house line is new-world wine in an old-world style. Their son Alex took over the estate farming in 2022, adding sheep grazing and carbon sequestration planning.

Food Pairing

Fifteen years has turned the tannin supple, so this wants braises rather than char. Short ribs cooked low in stock with onion, bay and tomato paste give the softened structure something to grip. Oxtail stew, reduced until sticky, pulls out the gunpowder and spice. Pork shoulder slow-roasted with fennel seed and garlic until the skin shatters works against the red-fruit side. For cheese, aged Gouda or a chunk of Parmigiano. Decant gently, pour off the sediment, drink it the same evening. A fifteen-year-old Napa Petite Sirah is what you open on a Tuesday to prove to yourself the cellar was a good idea.