Kinsman Eades: Napa ‘has more in common with Burgundy than it does with Bordeaux’
Since speaking to db back in 2023, husband-and-wife team Nigel and Shae Kinsman of boutique Napa producer Kinsman Eades have broadened their range of Cabernets and brought out a more approachable second wine, reports Arabella Mileham.
Nigel and Shae Kinsman“Initially, we had just three single vineyard wines – Rhadamanthus from Diamond Mountain, Anjea from Sleeping Lady and La Voleuse de Chagrin from Geeslin – but we now work with six different Cabernet sites,” Shae explained, over coffee at The Hoxton in Holborn in April, on the duo’s first visit to the UK in years.
They have also expanded with an entry-level wine, although this is perhaps better described as a “second” or “companion” wine as it’s not entry level as a UK consumer might understand it.
“American consumers tend to drink Cabernet very young, they love young, bright, youthful Cabernet – but Nigel makes wines that are built for aging,” Shae explains. “Nigel makes more structured, refined, classic styles of Cabernet, though still very Californian, because we’re making wine in a lot of sunshine, growing grapes. So we have told our consumers, trained them to buy them and put them down and age them, as you enjoy them so much more if you give them a little bit more time.”
“But that’s not a fantastic business strategy,” Shae laughs. “They’ve all been wonderful, obedient mailing list members and age their wine, but they often come to us and say, ‘we’ve been collecting your wine since your first vintage, we’ve been collecting it for five years, and we’ve never opened a bottle! So we decided to make a wine that was more immediacy, more approachable, and less of that driving structure and tannin, and definitely a lighter framework.”
Of course, Nigel is never going to make “a pushover of a wine”, Shae notes, so the resultant wine is structured while being “something our mailing list members wouldn’t feel guilty pulling the cork on”.
“We’re not very commercially minded. Most Napa brands will make their entry level Cabernet and make twelve times as much as the top one, because they’re doing it to scale. We’re not doing it to scale, we just want to give people something to drink while they’re waiting for our single vineyard to age.”
The new wine – Herothesion – is made from Cabernet Sauvignon grown in all six sites, with the blend depending on the vintage. The 2021 for example comes predominantly from Vine Hill Ranch in Oakville – a 70acre plot that Nigel has been working with since he was at Araujo estate, the former Reverie Vineyard in Diamond Mountain, Sleeping Lady Vineyard in Yountville, and Sleeping Lady, with a small amount from Ecotone vineyard (formerly Thorevilos). The other properties are Western Benchland in Oakville.
Vine Hill Ranch is, Shae notes “very special”, a Deel rocky loam with marine sediments. On the “Western benchland which, “in my mind, is kind of the sweet spot, one of the sweet spots of Napa valley”, Nigel agrees. “warm to hot at certain times of the year, but it is certainly an early site [geologically-speaking], and the soils do vary.”
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Nigel points out that there is a huge amount of diversity across Napa. “I think we’re all starting to understand that Napa probably has more in common with Burgundy than it really does with Bordeaux, if you remove the grape varietals that are grown there.”
“Viticulturally, Napa Valley would be – from a soil standpoint – the most diverse region in the world. It’s unbelievable. I mean, you think of Bordeaux that has a range in elevation of about 30 meters, from sea level up to 30 meters. Napa Valley is about zero to 800 meters. And then you’ve got this, the Vaca and the Mayacamas, you’ve got everything from clay-based soils to sand-based soils to rock-based soils to decomposed volcanic ash to the iron-rich soils. The diversity is so, so real.”
The current selection of six wines comprises: Kahnnos, sourced from the southern most area of Oakville, where it grows on coombs gravel and blue clue loam at Vine Hill Ranch; Rhadamanthus, one of Kinsman Eades’ northern-most sources from the former Reverie vineyard in the diamond mountain district, 800 asl on a steep, west-facing slope of rhyolite and tuff; Kodo, from is M-Bar Ranch (which is not imported to the UK, as only 150 cases are produced each year); Aphex, which comes from 30-year old vines grown on the rhyolite and tuff of Ecotone Vineyard; Aisana, from the alluvial loams of Rancho Pequeno vineyard and Anjea, where the grapes are grown on an alluvial fan of dark, gravelly loam.
This year only two barrels of La Voleuse du Chagrin were made, following the Geeslin vineyard being replanted in 2020. “The quality of the first crop is excellent, Nigel says, even though “the jury’s still out” on when it will be back in full production.
“I can tell now that the quality from this particular crop is excellent and could be a vineyard designate wine, but the problem with young vineyards is they can be inconsistent. So while we might have top quality now from 2024 vintage, there’s no guarantee that we’ll see that highest quality again from 2025 and so we need to make sure that if we’re going to put wine in the bottle, that we can have some consistency”, he explains. “It’s no good doing start, stop, start, stop, that just annoys a lot of people. So I think we’ll just get ‘25 and ‘26 under our belt, and just see where we land after that.”
Currently, about 85% of the wines are sold direct-to-consumer via its US-based mailing list of “loyal customers”, who proved their loyalty in 2020 after the Napa wildfires and resultant smoke taint almost brought the boutique Napa producer to its knees. Around 10% is sold to oversea markets with distributors in the UK, Denmark Switzerland, Japan, Singapore, China and Hong Kong, Australia, Greece and Czech Republic, but Shae admits that it is less complicated to send it overseas than to distribute within the US, where legislation requires them to report monthly “everything we’ve shipped by person”. However, the Trump tariffs have caused a pause, with Canada and China temporarily on hold. “We will hold wine for them. We do think that it is going to resolve, but the impact was immediate and severe,” she explains. “A lot of consumers in the States quite understand how quickly it impacted businesses in the States, let alone businesses around the world.”
Although as Nigel points out “the impact on our bottom line was not really that significant, because we don’t export terribly much.”
The aps into the care that the couple have taken over the last ten years to expand at a sustainable rate and grown the business organically. “We’ve never taken on investors,” Shae points out “And for the first couple of years, it was less than 200 cases, and we went to 400 and although we didn’t make anything in 2020, we increased [by] another few 100 cases. So it has been slow, organic growth at a rate that we’ve been able to support ourselves. We’re 10 years old now, and the business is finally at a point where it can support itself.”
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