A New Wine Bargain from Napa

Let Them Drink Cake?

Made by hand around the world, Layer Cake wines defy expectation at $15 a bottle.

By Virginie Boone | Monday, 08 March 2010 | 13:32

The Napa Valley has quickly become known as ground zero for expensive wines, very expensive wines, especially Cabernet Sauvignons, more often than not given the handle "cult Cabs." They can start at $100 -- start! -- and that's if you can even find them to buy.

So it's a bit of a shock to find out that there are actually bargain wines coming out of the valley, well-made, well-sourced, well-thought-through wines. Leave it to a character like Jayson Woodbridge to be behind some of the best of those, Layer Cake Wines.

Woodbridge is not a man who takes shortcuts, which has made him very successful at producing a much sought-after, super-high-end Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon under the whimsical name Hundred Acre, which sells for $250 and up a bottle.

"When you look at the genesis of something, you could make a hundred little shortcuts that would save you time or money or whatever," he said. "All those little shortcuts turn into a mountain of shortcuts and will kill you; you're never going to reach the absolute peak you could hit."

He's not alone in his intensity at this price point. But he may be one of the few with this climb-Everest-or-die-trying mindset who's also making wines for $15.

Inspiring grandparents

Woodbridge's inspiration is personal. A few years back, the vintner, who didn't grow up with money, believed that Hundred Acre was in some way betraying the memory of his humble Sicilian grandparents who made wine as well as pizzas and cakes by hand and at home. So he came up with another line of wines, Layer Cake, made as precisely as Hundred Acre but at a much more affordable price.

"I realized my grandfather never could have afforded a bottle of Hundred Acre," Woodbridge said. "It would have been out of his reach. I had never made a wine that the everyday man could buy and enjoy with his family that didn't break the bank."

He started tasting hundreds of wines in the $15 to $20 range, but found them very unimpressive. The offerings were dominated by huge corporate wineries with huge overheads and little imagination. With his lean, mean team and maniacal approach to pursuing perfection, Woodbridge figured he could do better.

So he began to search out fruit sources in some of his favorite wine regions of the world, places he believed he could get great fruit at reasonable prices and still rely on high-end winemaking techniques, employing the same people who make Hundred Acre to make each and every Layer Cake wine.

He then sat down and designed a simple black and white label to evoke the lovingly prepared cakes he recalled his grandmother making for him as a boy -- the ultimate symbol, in his mind, of something handmade with love -- placing the details of his grandfather's homespun, home-winemaking teachings on the other side.

"My grandfather said to me that the vines live in the ground and the ground has layers in it like grandma's cake," he explained. "It goes down into those layers and pulls the chocolate and mocha and blackberry jam and strawberries and all these flavors out of the ground and he explained the taste and smell of it was layered too."

Wines from around the world

The core Layer Cake wines include a Shiraz from South Australia; an old-vine Primitivo from Puglia, Italy; and a Malbec from Mendoza, with a Cotes du Rhone Syrah added in 2007 along with a Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. Woodbridge and his team of winemakers, including Helen Mawson and Hundred Acre superstar consultant Philippe Melka, see the options as a type of passport, a way for people to explore and taste from some of their favorite wine-growing areas.

"There's never been one label made by the same team flying around the world and doing this," Woodbridge added. "My personal mission is to make something really affordable and really stunning and show the wine world this is what can be done at this price point."

The key, he says, in addition to low overhead, is to take less margins on the wines, using that money instead to buy better fruit and incentivize the farmers with whom he works to let him pick when he wants to pick. He also thinks he's better attuned to know what an American wine drinker will like in an Australian Shiraz, Argentine Malbec or Italian Primitivo, a varietal genetically identical to what we know in California as Zinfandel.

The project requires at minimum four harvests a year, a pace Woodbridge welcomes as a chance to absorb a constant flow of information, likening it to having the chance to live four times the average life span. The wines are made, bottled and labeled in their country of origin and then shipped to the U.S. where they land in specialty retail shops or high-end grocery stores. At this point the demand is far outpacing what Woodbridge and his team can supply.

Despite Layer Cake's runaway success, if Woodbridge isn't happy with the end results in any given year he simply won't make the wine, as happened in 2007 with the Australian Shiraz (a 2008 vintage is out now). The quality, he says, just wasn't up to his standards -- crazy talk, some might say.

Woodbridge looks at it instead as a chance for people to try his other wines: the dark and brooding Malbec grown at 4,500-feet Andean elevation, or the inky, spicy old-vine Primitivo from Puglia, all of which are 100 percent those varietals. Or maybe folks want to sample a Napa Valley Cabernet, aged in French oak barrels the way Hundred Acre is made.

Never one to pass up an interesting opportunity, Woodbridge has just released a 2007 Pinot Noir sourced in part from the Carneros Appellation’s stately Stanly Ranch that will go by the label name Cherry Pie. His grandmother made those, too.

Virginie Boone is a Sonoma Valley-based wine writer. She has reported on the Northern California wine scene for the Santa Rosa Press Democrat and its affiliate food and wine magazine, Savor.

Photo: Jayson Woodbridge. Credit: Layer Cake Wines

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