Corison Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Kronos gives a ton and a quarter of grapes an acre. The vines went in in 1971, they are old and they are tired, and Cathy Corison has run the arithmetic more than once: pull them out, replant with modern material, and the same ground would give three to five tons. She has never done it. Kronos is eight acres of old Cabernet south of St. Helena, and it makes the wine the house is known for.

There is a reason vines that old still exist here, and it is a rootstock. Through the 1980s Napa pulled out its old plantings and replanted almost everything onto AxR-1, which was supposed to resist phylloxera and did not; within two decades the valley had to be replanted a second time. Kronos was on St George and stayed on St George. It never went through either replanting, which is why a block planted in 1971 is still standing where most of its contemporaries are not.

Corison made her name by picking early when nobody else did. Her Cabernets sit around twelve to thirteen per cent alcohol, and she built them that way through the decades when Napa moved decisively toward riper fruit and higher scores. As late as 2013, she told SevenFifty Daily, it still was not fashionable to make wine like this, and she could not make herself do anything else. For years her picking date was a joke at her expense — she has said other growers treated it as the signal to go and take their first sample of the season. The sommeliers backed the wines long before the critics did.

The farming was organic long before it was worth anything commercially, and for most of that time it was not certified. The certificate arrived in June 2023, and it arrived with her daughter. Grace Corison Martin came back to the winery in 2020 and has led its sustainability work since; in November 2025 the estate took the Golden Vines Sustainability Award.

What the register holds is worth being exact about. The USDA's organic database lists Corison Winery, Inc. under CCOF with an effective date of 12 June 2023, covering nineteen acres — Kronos and Sunbasket — and the scope is crops. There is no handling certificate on the entry. The vineyards are certified organic; the winery is not, and the wine is not sold as organic wine. That is a smaller claim than an organic winery, and it is the one the evidence supports.

Kronos is the expensive bottle and the reason people make the trip. The Napa Valley Cabernet comes from the same hands at a fraction of the price, and it is where most people should start.