History
The name honours the coach that ran from St. Helena over these hills to Monticello in the nineteenth century, and Black Bart, the bandit who robbed it. German settlers had vines here in the late 1800s, and their grapes were among the valley's dearest until deer and then Prohibition finished them. Jan Krupp, an internist, answered a 1991 newspaper advertisement for the property and found old vines still on it. He and his brother Bart assembled adjacent parcels into roughly 1,300 acres and began development in 1995, negotiating road access across dozens of neighbouring holdings and, after a geologist wrote the site off for water, drilling a well at 400 feet on a dowser's advice. The first harvest came in 1996 and the brothers' own label followed in 1999. E. & J. Gallo announced the purchase in March 2017 and closed in April at a reported $180 million, honouring existing grape contracts. Bart Krupp died in January 2024.
The Site
The property runs to some 1,300 acres eight miles up Soda Canyon Road in the eastern Vaca range, over 600 of them in vine between roughly 1,100 and 1,750 feet, above the valley fog across most of that span. It spans the Atlas Peak AVA and the southeastern edge of Pritchard Hill, which has no appellation of its own. The soils are the Hambright and Guenoc rock-outcrop complexes, red volcanic clay loam over fractured basalt, andesite and tufa, boulder-strewn enough that clearing the ground meant moving over a billion pounds of rock. The site runs off the grid on generator power, and farming is Certified California Sustainable, with permanent cover crops, insectaries and owl boxes.
Vines and Blocks
The blocks fall into four sectors. Pritchard Hill occupies southwestern slopes that take marine air through Foss Valley; the Heart of the Vineyard is a central saddle of deep volcanic bowls, south-facing and sheltered, open to maximum midday sun; the Bordeaux sector is cooler and sits on deeper, less rocky clay loam; and the Atlas Peak sector is the warmest and most thickly strewn with flat rock. Sixteen varieties are planted, with more than half the acreage in Cabernet Sauvignon on a clone list running from 4, 7, 8, 15 and 337 to heritage selections: Mondavi's To Kalon 31, Niebaum-Coppola 29, See 30 and Weimer. Cabernet Franc, Merlot, Malbec and Petit Verdot fill out the Bordeaux set, followed by Syrah, Petite Sirah, Tempranillo, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc, Viognier, Marsanne and Roussanne, with a Zinfandel block on the Aldo and Crane selections. Blocks are numbered, not named: C3A is 1.63 acres of clone 337 at 1,600 feet, and Venge holds a long contract on I-2B near the vineyard's high point.
The Wines
Gallo takes fruit for Louis M. Martini, a component of Lot No. 1 since 2003, and for Orin Swift and William Hill Estate, but roughly seventy per cent of the crop still goes to some eighty outside buyers. More than thirty labels carry the vineyard's name, among them Pahlmeyer, Paul Hobbs, Venge, Caymus, Miner Family and Krupp Brothers, while Robert Biale bottles the Zinfandel. The designates are mountain Cabernet in the textbook sense, dense and black-fruited, with graphite and cocoa over muscular tannin and the acidity that elevation preserves.