2013 Ovid Winery Experiment R8.3

Ovid Napa Valley was founded in St. Helena in 2000 by Mark Nelson and Dana Johnson. The husband-and-wife team started a software company in the 1980s and sold it a decade later, allowing them to pursue their shared interest in wine. They acquired 15 acres on Pritchard Hill and named the winery after the Roman poet Ovid, author of Metamorphoses, which tells the stories of classical Greek and Roman mythology. Ovid had also been the name of the couple’s software company. Nelson and Johnson hired some of Napa Valley’s most esteemed winemaking and viticultural consultants, including David Abreu and Andy Erickson. Today the winemaker is Austin Peterson. Raised in Santa Rosa in a winemaking family, Peterson helped pay for his degree in enology at UC Davis by making and selling his own wines. He worked in winemaking in California, France, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Argentina before joining Ovid in 2006. Ovid’s signature wine is a Bordeaux blend, and the winery produces only about 500 cases a year.

Napa Valley AVA is the most famous winemaking region in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world. With nearly 43,000 acres of vineyards and more than 300 wineries, it is the heart of fine wine production in the United States. Winemaking started in Napa in 1838 when George C. Yount planted grapes and began producing wine commercially. Other winemaking pioneers followed in the late 19th century, including the founders of Charles Krug, Schramsberg, Inglenook and Beaulieu Vineyards. An infestation of phylloxera, an insect that attacks vine roots, and the onset of Prohibition nearly wiped out the nascent Napa wine industry in the early 20th century. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s Robert Mondavi and other visionaries were producing quality wines easily distinguishable from the mass-produced jug wines made in California’s Central Valley. Napa Valley’s AVA was established in 1983, and today there are 16 sub-appellations within the Napa Valley AVA. Many grapes grow well in Napa’s Mediterranean climate, but the region is best known for Cabernet Sauvignon. Chardonnay is also very successfully cultivated, and about 30% of the AVA’s acreage is planted to white grapes, with the majority of those grapes being Chardonnay,