by Nan Reiley
Sixty-five hundred miles, as the crow flies, away from home in New Zealand, Hall Winemaker Richard Batchelor has found his new digs in California’s Wine Country to be much to his liking.
In 2000, with his freshly-conferred degree in viticulture and enology in hand (from Lincoln University in Christchurch), Richard was determined to set out to visit the different wine regions of the world. He landed at St. Francis Winery & Vineyards in Sonoma County at the end of August, 2000. Here he hit the harvest running, so to speak, and when the grape juice had settled, he found himself offered a position as enologist and laboratory director, which he accepted and held until 2003, when he joined the newly created Hall Wines in St. Helena, Napa County. In 2006, he became Hall’s head winemaker.
Here Richard is making classic French Bordeaux varieties, both red and white, in a California setting. The Hall family (Kathryn Hall is a former U.S. Ambassador to Austria) owns two Napa Valley properties, a high-end gravity-flow production facility in Rutherford, and the old Napa Valley Cooperative Winery in St. Helena, now being transformed into an architectural marvel under the creative leadership of Frank Gehry. Richard is eagerly anticipating the completion of his new winemaking headquarters, scheduled for the harvest of 2008.
Richard says that his winemaking style focuses on the unique properties of each vineyard he works with. Almost all the fruit he uses is estate grown, so he, in cooperation with the vineyard manager, can carefully control all aspects of vine growth and development throughout the growing season, including irrigation, canopy management, nutrient regime and so on. The goal of this vineyard micro-management is to permit the grapes to be completely expressive of the unique character of the soil and climate of their parent vineyard.
“One vineyard may produce a Cabernet that is fruit-driven and aromatic,” he says, “while another will give us a Cabernet that is more structured, more intense. We ‘encourage’ each vineyard to be true to its own flavor profile.” The purity of vineyard expression is further enhanced by HALL’s organic farming and reliance on native yeast in its fermentions..
In spite of the fact that Richard thinks California winemakers have an easy growing season compared to the cold and wet summers of New Zealand, he doesn’t see any real differences in winemaking practices per se. “Almost all winemakers travel around the world’s wine-growing regions sooner or later,” he says, “and what you get is the cross-pollination of ideas, so we all know what the other one is doing. No part of the world has a lock on winemaking innovation.”
However, Richard does have a lock on some excellent wines. Hall makes Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc, as well as some Bordeaux blends. These varieties are packaged in two different series of wine, the Napa Valley Collection and the Artisan Series. The Artisan Series features single-vineyard wines and is obviously very limited in quantity. One of Richard’s current favorites is called “Exzellenz,” a 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from the winery’s Sacrashe Vineyard. The word “Exzellenz” is a playful reference in German to Kathryn Hall’s term as Ambassador to Austria.
Your best bet on tasting these limited-edition wines is to visit the tasting room in St. Helena. The tasting room is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The wine-tasting fee is $15 per person, but if you go to the winery’s website, www.hallwines.com, you can get a coupon for one free tasting for two people, good Monday through Friday. The Hall website, by the way, is an excellent source of detailed information about the winery. Hall St. Helena is located at 401 St. Helena Hwy (Rte. 29), just south of downtown. For more information, call (707) 967-2626.

Related Information

• Hall Wines