Fantesca Estate & Winery

The Free Bacchus Story

Susan and Duane Hoff came to wine from Best Buy, which, in the estate’s words, they helped turn into a Fortune 100 company. In 2004 they bought a 53-acre parcel on Spring Mountain Road, St Helena, with a 10-acre vineyard on it. The estate tells an older story about the land, that it was part of the more than 300 acres Caroline Bale brought to her marriage with Charles Krug in 1860.

By the estate’s account the old vineyard was lost to phylloxera and Prohibition and lay dormant for more than seven decades, until it was replanted with Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot in 1997. Spring Mountain District is an official growing area inside Napa Valley whose boundary runs along the Napa–Sonoma county line, and up these slopes the soil is thin and rocky.

The Hoffs say they put the vineyard into sustainable and organic farming as soon as they bought it. Certification came in October 2023, nineteen years later, and it covers 6.5 acres of grapes, about two-thirds of the vineyard they bought. The estate does not say why it waited.

The boundary is sharp. The certificate covers the grapes and not the winemaking, so no Fantesca wine is certified organic, whatever the farming behind it. The Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, from the Spring Mountain vineyard, is the wine to know.