Favia: producer profile and five wines tasted
Power couple Annie Favia and Andy Erickson are a true viticulture and winemaking team. Clare Tooley MW meets with Annie to discuss her passion for crafting exceptional wines with a deep connection to nature and place in Napa Valley.
I first met Annie Favia in 2018. She put Coombsville on the map for me, literally, by walking me through its vineyards in the cool bay fog of the early morning.
She entreated me to touch the cold vine leaves and take the volcanic soils into my hands. This was to feel exactly what grounds and guides this sub-appellation of the Napa Valley.
Coombsville, granted its AVA in 2011, is a special corner of the wine world, steeped in bucolic charm. It begins the Napa wine trail to the southeast of the town, sitting just to one side, as if cautious to protect its privacy. The millions of visitors driving north to Napa see it through their rear-view windows – if they see it at all.
Scroll down to see Clare Tooley MW’s tasting notes and scores for five Favia wines
Recently I tasted with her again in the shade of the London plane trees beside the old stone-walled Prohibition winery atop a cool and Petrus-sized barrel cellar. Annie and her husband Andy Erickson renovated it and made it their home.
Their homestead lies in the heart of Coombsville, surrounded by vineyards with views stretching up to the east-side mountain range. This is where Annie cultivates herbs and flowers for her organic tea range, Erda.
A farmer’s daughter, she tends the Beatrix Potter-like potager bursting with squashes and leafy greens. This is all under the watchful eye of Chester the cat who keeps the rabbits at bay but warmly welcomes tasters.
Wildflowers and Blue Grama grasses ripple in the breeze that lifts the heat and is a marker of this corner of Napa. This is a place where nature thrives and rejuvenates in verdancy. One could linger here and be refreshed. It is a place of reverie.
That is until you taste the Favia wines and realise profoundly that there is nothing folksy, whimsical or artisanal about their range. Crafted with character in abundance, but honed to the highest standard; immaculate, considered and concentrated.
Tasting the Favia wines
Favia wines require your undivided attention, their structural detail being so precise and nuanced. There is a verbena and peppermint freshness running through all of them. This is backed up by a chamomile subtlety and a drive one cannot help but connect to their volcanic origins.
The reds are polished thoroughbreds, dense and compact, their tannins mastered and tempered. Fruit is in abundance, but is minutely selected to achieve a perfect symmetry of ripe and savory.
The Chardonnay is seamless and vibrant, vertical and fresh, a nod to Chablis.
Favia fact file
Founded 2001
Owners Annie Favia-Erickson and Andy Erickson
Key vineyards Rancho Chimiles, Meteor and Oakville Ranch
Key wines Coombsville: Carbone Chardonnay and Favia Cabernet Sauvignon; Oakville: Favia La Magdalena Red and Favia Cabernet Sauvignon; Napa Valley: Favia Cerro Sur Red
Influences from Europe and closer to home
France and its wines were an early influence on Annie as she studied French literature at the Sorbonne in Paris during her college years.
John Kongskaard and Cathy Corison inspired her love for Cabernet Franc and her progression into the vineyards.
As a viticulturist for David Abreu Vineyard Management, Annie has overseen the crafting of vineyard sites that Napa Valley, and now its world audience, most treasures. Sites her husband, Andy Erickson, knows intimately too, as the consultant winemaker to an illustrious list of Napa Valley’s finest estates.
When Annie talks of her love for vineyard architecture, her conversation flows unstoppable through the mapping, planning, planting and precision-care of the many vineyards she has worked and walked over the decades.
Listening to her is like walking through them with her: a visceral experience.
She tells me how she compels herself to bring fresh eyes each time to the work and to the vineyards. Not a vine-whisperer then, more a vine-listener, and a woman guided by intuition and backed by decades of experience on the ground.
Nature and land expressed through wine
She is a force of, and for, nature, just as Andy brings a deep understanding and experience of winemaking.
Annie believes tannins are his specialty, garnered by his work for the cooperage Seguin Moreau, tasting the finest wines directly from barrel throughout the Americas and beyond.
Tactile is the word I’d use to encompass the experience of Favia wines. That feel for the place and the vines translates to the wines through palate texture – an amalgam of fruit and oak tannins mastered to such a degree it’s almost impossible to tell them apart.
The question you ask yourself when tasting the Favia wines is where does the fruit end and the winemaking begin? Stumped, you realise that what Annie and Andy have achieved is the balancing of the best of both these worlds.
They make wines where nature, land, plant and person cohere, creating unity and wines of absolute quality.
Looking to the future
For the last few years, they have concentrated their efforts on their Napa wines and the vineyards they steward.
When asked for her thoughts on the future of Favia, Annie tells me of her inherent belief in the resilience of the vine.
She sees our duty as accepting the truth of climate change and working with vines to facilitate their intrinsic survival gene.
To craft the best possible wine, we must give vines and viticulture the wherewithal to adapt accordingly. The only way to achieve that symbiosis is to listen to what nature is telling us.
She urges us to step away from computers and onto the land.
Before I leave, we walk through her gardens. She touches nearly every plant she passes. I drive away from Coombsville with a bag full of garden produce: beans, squashes, zucchinis and tomatoes, warm and smelling of summer.
Five Favia wines tasted:
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Favia, Carbone Chardonnay, Napa Valley, Coombsville, California, USA, 2020
The aromas are restrained but compelling, influenced perhaps by the herb gardens that grow alongside the vineyard. There is chamomile and verbena together with just a hint of the apricot and mango of ripe California Chardonnay. The palate is equally restrained, refreshingly steely, with a sinewy backbone of acidity supporting ripe yellow tree fruit. Malolactic fermentation was blocked but a plushness exists to the texture from battonage and there is a definite sensation of spongy compression on the mid palate, generous and delicious. The finish is pure-fruited and long. This is a lovely, refreshing wine to drink right now, light on its feet but sinewy as a dancer.
2020
FaviaNapa Valley
Favia, Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, Coombsville, California, USA, 2014
This was the second vintage produced and a real joy to taste. There’s a lavender lift on the nose, redolent also of fresh currants, bursting figs and mocha chocolate. The wine envelopes the palate with dark fruit cut through with seams of cool vineyard and cooler vintage acidity, woven with fine, silty tannins that act like a silken mesh. They are subtle but only just beginning to loosen as they resolve into the mass of dark cherry and bramble fruit. The flavours evolve throughout the palate with cocoa, nutmeg and tobacco joining the clamour. But it is the tannins that bring real focus and presence to this wine and bring it to a close, prolonging the finish and ensuring the wine will continue to age, harmonise and resonate for decades. Impressive, graceful despite its density, ethereal despite its weight and body mass, complex and characterful, this is a wine to ponder.
2014
FaviaNapa Valley
Favia, Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley, Oakville, California, USA, 2014
Inky-dark, this wine gives less away at first than its Coombsville cousin. Brooding, classic Cabernet graphite melds with oak barrel baking spice then begins to reveal dark cassis and rosemary on the nose. In the mouth however, the wine really ripples with power. There is a beautiful ferrous vein to this wine, a nod to its red, iron-rich vineyard soils. The tannin structure swells and widens in the mouth to the point of almost overwhelming the fruit on the finish. There is a Pauillac-like monolithic grandeur to it at this stage. The wine is truly beautiful, impressive and compelling now, complex but expressive, abundantly flavourful and massive. It is a profound wine and asks a lot of questions of the taster. It is bound to reach a plusher, more open profile in time. It would do no harm to leave it to its ageing for a few more years, sure in the knowledge that it will deliver layered pleasure for decades to come.
2014
FaviaNapa Valley
Favia, La Magdalena, Napa Valley, California, USA, 2016
As deeply hued as the Cerro Sur, the aromas are markedly riper and red-fruited – a result of the 6°C warmer temperatures of the Oakville Ranch vineyard in the eastern hills of Oakville where this fruit is sourced. Sweeter, more floral, the aromas of rosehip and old rose petals lead to a mouthful of rich, red and black fruit compote laced with nutmeg and spice. Plush-textured, the tannins flex throughout the mouth, beautifully in sync with both the fruit and the fresh, juicy acidity, but refusing to sit still. The impression is one of vivacity and mobile power, also of agelessness. This is a hedonistic wine, multi-layered, exciting, structured but refusing rigidity. Drinking beautifully now and will hold this seductive grace for at least four years before becoming even more generous and opulent over another 15 years or more.
2016
FaviaNapa Valley
Favia, Cerro Sur, Napa Valley, California, USA, 2016
Intriguing aromas that briefly recall freshly turned earth before turning to dark berries and dark chocolate cocoa powder. In the mouth the wine is immediately vigorous, with a wash of fresh acidity supporting an extraordinary concentration of the darkest fruit shot through with liquorice. It’s the tannins, or rather their structure, that make the lasting impression. They are felt at first on the tip of the tongue, condensed and finely grained, offering at once support and cushioning to the fine fruit. They are open-spaced, creating an impression of ‘give’ on the mid palate, tightening a little on the long finish as if tailor-made to dress the fruit in beauty and to complete the impression of haute-couture elegance. A savoury wine, powerful, upright and in its prime now. It’s likely to hold this poised balance for another five or six years before developing its earthier undertones and relaxing into maturity over a further decade or more.
2016
FaviaNapa Valley
