Napa Valley’s Ovid: Producer profile plus 10 wines to try

Collectors of California’s top fine wines will tell you that Ovid is a name that signals the upper echelon of wine produced from well-tended vines rooted in Napa Valley’s famed Pritchard Hill area high above Oakville.

English literature students will know Ovid as the Roman poet whose seminal work, Metamorphoses – writings on transformation, composed in hexameter verse – is a must-read. Healthcare professionals use a search tool called Ovid that combs online articles and data in science and medicine.

Scroll down to see tasting notes and scores for 10 Ovid wines to try

The founding

Experimentation has proved a guiding light at the iconic Pritchard Hill estate, now owned by the Duncan family of Silver Oak and Twomey fame. With 7.28 new plantable hectares realised in recent years, the experiments continue, and the wines are only improving.

But Ovid, the winery, founded in 2000 by Mark Nelson and his wife Dana Johnson, is an amalgam of all three: a cult wine label with ties to the poet and the healthcare tool. Nelson had studied English Literature at Columbia University, and Johnson was a software engineer.

In 1988, Nelson founded a company specialising in the function of internet searches. He named it Ovid Technologies in a collegial nod to its transformational search technology. Its complex internet search functions were novel, and the company was so successful that a decade after its founding it sold for $200 million.

After the sale of the company, Nelson and Johnson, who was the company’s vice president of software development, took their fortunes and metamorphosed them into the grand experiment they named Ovid — the name an obvious homage to their previous work and passions.

The couple purchased 6.07ha of land on Pritchard Hill, hired renowned vineyard manager David Abreu, and planted vines in 2000. They enlisted winemaker Andy Erickson and master blender Michel Rolland, and at the start, the aim was to produce one wine — Ovid, a wine of place. But from the outset, they actually made two wines.

Initial vintages

After blending the first vintage of Ovid, a good amount of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot was leftover and delicious. Johnson’s idea was to bottle it and call it an Experiment—and to make an experimental blend with intention each year.

She believed the Experiment wines would help accelerate the qualitative understanding of the Ovid-level wines. This grape-growing incubator would allow the team to fine-tune the style of their flagship wine.

The first vintages they bottled were the 2005 Ovid Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley and 2005 Experiment K 1.5, which I have tasted and reviewed below. The wines were released in 2008.

Today, the Ovid portfolio includes the flagship Ovid Napa Valley Cabernet, a Napa Cabernet Franc called Hexameter (a nod to poet Ovid’s hexameter verse), a Napa Valley Syrah, and a single-block expression of Cabernet called Loc. Cit., an abbreviation of the Latin phrase Loco Citato, typically referenced in footnotes, which means ‘in the place cited.’ It also includes the Experiment wines.

The Duncan family, owners of Silver Oak and Twomey, bought Ovid in 2017. David Abreu’s vineyard management company oversaw farming until 2022 when the work transitioned to Betanelli Vineyard Management.

Winemaker Austin Peterson, who started at OVID in 2006 as an enologist working alongside Andy Erickson and was named winemaker in 2010, said of the Betanelli family, ‘It’s a good partnership, and they have done a lot of research on the technical side,’ which is critical for Peterson who dabbles daily in vine minutia.

‘While others have been asking if we should plant new varieties like Grenache and Portuguese varieties [because of climate change], we have been looking at better systems for the classic Bordeaux varieties we work with now.’

Pritchard Hill terroir

On Pritchard Hill, it’s hard to imagine a world without Cabernet Sauvignon, given the neighbours: Colgin, David Arthur, Chappellet, Realm, and Bryant Family. ‘The next Cabernet is Cabernet,’ says Duncan, ‘If we can’t grow Cabernet Sauvignon in Napa, the earth’s problems will be much different.’

Ask any of the 15 wineries who own vines on this hill. They’ll tell you there is a real distinctiveness to the wines produced here — a brightness to the fruit that calls to mind the iron-rich, red soils, alive and aromatic on a warm sunny afternoon, and maybe some sage and bay leaf from the Bay Laurels.

Ovid at a glance

Founded: 2000 by Mark Nelson and his wife Dana Johnson

Owner: Duncan family

Annual production: 30,000 bottles

Total hectares planted to vines: 6ha

Elevation: 411m

Key vineyard details: The vineyard is divided into 0.4ha blocks with different rootstock and clonal combinations. Grown in iron rich organic soils high on Pritchard Hill. 

Key wines: Four estate wines comprised of Cabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Petit Verdot and Syrah. The wines are Ovid Napa Valley, Hexameter, Syrah and Loc Cit. There are also experimental wines made each vintage. 

Winemaker: Austin Peterson

But the word hill is deceiving. Some researchers have tried to assemble the wineries into districts with properties influenced by Lake Hennessey or others at higher and lower elevations.

A good way to think of Pritchard Hill is to think of the commune sites of Vosne-Romanée and its climats, like Richebourg, La Romanée and Romanée-Conti, to name a few. Different climats beget distinct expressions of Vosne Romanée, which is a small place — all of 154ha under vine. Pritchard Hill is small, too, with roughly 145ha under vine.

Vines begin at 252.98m and climb to 487.68m in elevation and come to rest on a series of plateaus and steep canyons. Most are above the fog layer, over 304.8m. Aside from the kaleidoscope of vineyard land, water availability varies.

Half a mile to the east of Ovid, wells are up to 20% drier. But a unifying factor is rock — giant boulders pulled out of the ground and, as at Ovid, that line the roadway.

New owners, the same thread of experimentation

David Duncan has a personal history with the wines, having collected them since their first vintage release. He met founders Mark and Dana when their children attended the same primary school in St. Helena, and Duncan fondly recalls hearing about Ovid’s experiments from Nelson.

The threads of experimentation go hand in hand with the principles Duncan values at Silver Oak. ‘The way we put the blends together every year differs,’ he explains, ‘an annual experiment dictated by what Mother Nature gives us.’ Duncan sees similar threads, too, in how Ovid releases wine later than most wineries — the same goes for Silver Oak and Twomey. ‘We’re basically doing the same things but at different wineries.’

In 2017, Duncan agreed to come to a meeting with Mark, Dana and Jack Bitner, and he asserts he hadn’t come with any intention of buying Ovid. ‘I knew they were considering selling and figured they’d want some advice.’ But as the conversation wore on, Duncan thought about the 526ha Stagecoach Vineyard on Pritchard Hill, which had just sold, and wondered about Ovid’s next steward.

‘It’s a singular piece of property,’ he marvels, ‘there’s nothing like it. I realised there was a clear opportunity for Ovid, especially knowing Austin’s desire for experimentation.’ The discovery of another 7.28 plantable hectares at Ovid sealed the deal.

New plantings, more enterprise

From the get-go, the vineyards at Ovid have been designed and farmed with what Peterson says is a 100-year perspective — allowing for no inputs in the vineyard. ‘By creating the environment that provides the right resources for the vine at the right time, we hope not to have any inputs needed.’

The goal is for the wines to express ‘the most transparent expression of this place possible’ by making the site self-sufficient and flexible enough to adjust to what works and what doesn’t. Denser 1.8×0.91m vine-spacing on the original 6.07ha, for instance, proved to have little flexibility on trellising and canopy management.

Keeping in line with experimentation, the new 7.2ha of vines are planted on various spacings ranging from 2.4×2.4m head-trained vines to 2.1×1.2m and 2.4×1.2m, and also 3.0×1.5m, which is old California sprawl, Peterson tells me.

The point with wider spacing allows tight VSP training to a wide-angled canopy to protect the grapes. ‘It allows us to tailor the canopy to the size of the underground reservoir for each plant. We want to manage everything so we don’t have to put up shade cloth, for instance, and that’s why we prefer to focus on canopy management.’ It’s also a labour mitigator. They can farm easier with less labour with wider spacing.

Some plantings that went in the ground in the spring of 2022 were 609mm rootstocks, which allowed Peterson to immediately graft clones without an interpreter issue coming up down the road. I asked about the eventual height of the vine, which would climb relatively high, and Peterson quickly answered: ‘Higher up means less disease pressure. We’re taking the 100-year perspective!’

In the spring of 2023, they will graft selections of Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc from ‘vineyards we know and love that have been selected over the years for their outstanding characteristics’.

If Ovid’s beginning is marked by David Abreu’s experimentation with rootstocks and clones, the next chapter, led by the Betanellis, goes a step further. Clonal and rootstock experiments will continue, along with new row orientations and trellising.

During my visit to Ovid, we tasted 10 wines from four different vintages showcasing the evolution of Ovid, Experiment, and Hexameter, and a brand new Experiment white. My observations, notes, and scores are detailed below.

Ovid revealed: 10 wines from the estate

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