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Napa Valley winemaker Kale Anderson and Mochi walk a Coombsville vineyard in July.
Kale Wines' Christophe Smith pours at Hospice du Rhône in Paso Robles in April.
When Kale Anderson joined in a wine festival this spring down on the Central Coast, it didn’t say “double-outlier” anywhere on his name badge, but it easily could have.
For nearly two decades, the career winemaker has been responsible for many sought-after Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignons, earning critical reviews and scores that have helped burnish his reputation. Yet in any roomful of Napa counterparts, Anderson manages to set himself apart through his own label, Kale Wines, with its focus on Rhône Valley grape varieties.
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And in April at Hospice du Rhône, the bi-annual celebration of wines produced from those same grapes, he stood even further out from the crowd as one of the only Napa vintners in the room — or, as it happened, at the Paso Robles Event Center.
The outlier’s role is familiar to Anderson, and it’s one he embraces. “Cabernet Sauvignon is fantastic here in Napa Valley, and it makes the whole world go around in our community,” he said a few days before traveling down to Paso Robles to share his decidedly non-Cabernet wines with nearly 1,600 fellow Rhône enthusiasts. “But there's a lot of other cool stuff, too. That’s the passion project. That's why I started my own business.”
Calling it a “project” describes the lengths to which Anderson and his wife, Ranko, have gone since founding Kale Wines. The couple’s label is devoted to the core trio of red Rhône Valley varieties that can stir up winemaking passions in California: Syrah, Grenache and Mourvèdre. He produces rosé and red wines from blends of all three, along with a varietal Syrah that, for its complexity and age-ability, could rival some of the Cabernets he’s put in the bottle since starting his career.
When Anderson was a pre-med student at UC Davis in the late 1990s, the genesis of that career came unexpectedly when he attended a “Rhônes Around the World” tasting. He remembers a signature California Grenache-Syrah blend, Bonny Doon’s Le Cigare Volant, being revealed after the blind tasting, along with an Australian Shiraz, a Spanish Garnacha, and French reds from Saint-Joseph and Châteauneuf-du-Pape, two of the Rhône Valley’s top appellations.
“It was one of those moments where it was like, ‘wow, these wines are so wildly different. I can really get into this,’” he said, recalling the bottles that caused a light bulb to turn on. “I liked the idea of traveling and of working outside, working with my hands. And I liked the idea of being creative but wasn't sure if I had a good palate or if I could get inspired, you know, to do it in this medium.”
He credited the Davis tasting as his inspiration. “That was my original, not just Rhône wine moment, but kind of the ‘aha’ wine moment,” he said. “And also the idea that terroir was real, it kind of blew my mind.”
It’s not just terroir that gets magnified by Rhône-style grapes and wines, but the significance of the entire category. Every other April, Hospice du Rhône is their showcase.
Anderson experimented with his first, tiny lot of Grenache at the university’s winery (“I made it in a garbage can,” he laughed) and helped produce Colgin Cellars’ IX Estate Syrah as an intern in 2002. Early on in what would become a Cabernet-focused career, these two Rhône varieties had him hooked.
Establishing Kale Wines several years later was no mere matter of securing grape sources. Rather, as he developed an appreciation for grapes grown in different terroirs, Anderson identified specific Napa Valley sites whose potential most excited him. To incorporate Syrah into his winemaking, he accessed fruit from two renowned properties: the Hyde Vineyards in Carneros; and, straddling Pritchard Hill and Atlas Peak, Stagecoach Vineyard.
As for the Grenache-Mourvèdre blends, which come out of McGah Vineyard in Rutherford, they speak directly to the effort it took the couple to launch Kale Wines in the first place. It was a project literally from the ground up.
“My relationship with the McGah family goes back to 2005 when I was working at Cliff Lede,” the vintner said in mid-April while his GM, Christophe Smith, poured glasses of 2019 and ’20 dry rosés. In advance of the Hospice du Rhône weekend, Smith opened a few current wines, both pink and red, in his Alta Heights backyard to taste.
“They approached me in 2011 about planting some new vines in one of the vineyard blocks and asked what I wanted to do, assuming I was going to choose Cabernet. And I said, ‘you really should plant Grenache, Mourvèdre and Viognier, and some other fun things.’ And they were like, ‘you know, we didn't expect you to say that!’”
The McGahs worked closely with Anderson during his six-year tenure as winemaker at Cliff Lede, selling a large portion of their estate’s Sauvignon Blanc to the Yountville winery. If they’d known then about his deep affinity for wines from the Rhône Valley and Provence — regions where Syrah and Grenache parallel Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot in Napa Valley — then the acre of vines he elected to plant in their Heritage Block probably wouldn’t have surprised them.
For his part, Anderson wasn’t surprised that the plan came together, though it took some creative thinking to make it happen.
He brought the McGahs and their president, Mattie Cooper, an idea that quickly evolved into a contract for Kale Wines to buy all of the Grenache and Mourvèdre he’d help them plant.
To vinify a dry rosé, he would use fruit from the customary early pick in the vineyard — grapes that would otherwise get dropped to the ground to increase flavor concentration in the remaining bunches. Then, during the fall harvest, he’d pick the fully ripe grapes to make McGah Vineyard Heritage, his proprietary red wine. He called it a win-win.
“Paying rosé prices for the rosé grapes, and then paying red prices for the red is the way it makes financial sense to not have Cabernet Sauvignon planted in Rutherford,” he explained as he sipped a glass of his pale, pink wine. “It's basically the same fruit harvested two months later and made with the skins. It's a pretty crazy juxtaposition.” To be sure, it was an unusual arrangement in one of California’s iconic Cabernet appellations.
Of course, a grape grower’s accounting on paper and their actual vines in the ground need to make equal sense. Through experience with Grenache-based wines from France, Anderson understood that the best chance for his block of vines in McGah would be to create a more advantageous soil environment.
He noted that Rhône varieties grow very well in calcareous, or chalky, soils, “and we don't have a whole lot of those soils in Northern California. But I knew if we did the soil prep correctly, I could get the pH and calcium and all of these parameters, and I could really elevate them.”
So he embarked in 2011 on a project to modify the soil in his section of the Heritage Block. He had an excavator dig trenches a few feet deep along the block’s vine rows, with the removed dirt mounded between each trench. Then a combination of gypsum and lime was spaded into those mounds and backfilled with a mix of gravel into the trenches.
“I knew how those profiles looked in places like the Rhône where I really like the wines,” he said, acknowledging at the same time that he wasn’t going to completely change the profile in McGah Vineyard. But the soil amendment was a step in the direction he wanted to go.
From 2013, when the vines planted in the chalkier soil began to produce harvestable grapes, to the current wines tasted in Christophe Smith’s backyard, Anderson reckons that his idea has proved out successfully.
“The grenache and mourvèdre in Rutherford are totally unique,” he noted with pride. “They don’t make a big, ripe fruit bomb. There's balance, and there’s dustiness and tannin to the wine. It has backbone.”
In outlier fashion, he has added to the Cabernet-centric definition of Rutherford with a couple of ringer grape varieties, doing so in a small but significant way. “I mean, the Heritage blend is kind of classic Rutherford, and the grapes have that Rutherford dust,” he said. “They absolutely work at McGah. It's why I think it's such a unique site that makes a unique wine.”
Moving from the rosés to red wines, Smith echoed the winemaker as he thought about the impending Hospice du Rhône and Kale Wines’ place in it. “You stick out as a sore thumb when you're making Rhône varieties in Cabernet land,” he observed. “So we continue to be unique, but in a different way. What we benefit from in Paso Robles is that our sore thumb situation is that we're from Napa.”
He acknowledged that Kale Wines sometimes take people in Napa Valley by surprise, whereas down at the Rhône festival, they would "be with a bunch of actual Rhône winemakers — a lot of like-minded people that are really looking for this style of wine.”
“It's both following the passion for Rhône wines and going to where the passion is,” Smith added.
Over Anderson’s successful, Cabernet-driven career, those same words describe his relationship to Syrah, Grenache, and Mourvèdre — the grapes he’s kept in his back pocket along the way.
“It's a passion project,” he said again. “With the Kale brand, it was almost like a commitment to myself. I just wanted to honor the original passion.”
Dry, warm weather this year had reduced disease pressure on vines and was also set to lead to an early start to the grape harvest.
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