Favia: producer profile and five wines tasted

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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