Spottswoode Estate

The Free Bacchus Story

Jack Novak died of a heart attack on 14 November 1977. He was forty-four, and he and Mary had moved onto the property five years earlier, selling his medical practice to do it. Mary was left with five children and a vineyard she had never planned to run, so she ran it.

In 1982 she hired Tony Soter as winemaker and released the first Spottswoode Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. Soter took on the vineyard as well as the cellar, and it was with him that the estate began farming organically, from 1985. The Estate Cabernet still comes off that vineyard in St. Helena, and Corison, a few miles away and also listed here, is its nearest relative in style: both make the case that Napa Cabernet can be built for twenty years rather than for the first five minutes of a tasting.

The organic certificate came from CCOF in January 1992 and has not lapsed since. Biodynamic farming followed in 2008 and Demeter certified it in 2020, the same year B Lab certified the company as a B Corp. The estate says that made it the first winery in Napa Valley to hold that certification, which is its claim rather than something B Lab’s record ranks.

Both certificates are worth reading closely, because both describe the vineyard rather than the cellar. The US organic register lists Spottswoode Estate Vineyard for crops only — grapes, olives and olive oil across 45 acres — and there is no handling certificate, which is the part that would cover the winemaking. Demeter USA’s directory says the same thing in its own terms: grapes for wine and olives, nothing processed. So the grapes are certified organic and biodynamic, and the wine is made from them in a cellar neither certificate inspects. That is narrower than a certified wine, and worth knowing if the certificate is what you are buying.

Beth Novak Milliken joined in 1987 and Lindy Novak in 1992, and the two sisters run the estate now. It has never left the family, and the organic certificate their mother took in January 1992 has now run unbroken for more than three decades.