History
Cathy Corison founded her winery in 1987 and spent years buying fruit from the St. Helena and Rutherford benchlands before she owned any of it. In 1995 she and her husband William Martin bought the vineyard that surrounds the winery barn he designed. The vines were already twenty-four years old, and because they stand on phylloxera-resistant St. George rootstock they came through the 1980s replanting intact, which is why so little Napa Cabernet of that age survives elsewhere.
The Site
Roughly eight acres on the gravelly bench beside Highway 29 south of St. Helena, on the well-drained apron that runs out of the Mayacamas between Rutherford and St. Helena. The winery sits inside the vineyard rather than beside it.
Vines and Blocks
One block of 1971 Cabernet Sauvignon, thick-trunked and low-yielding at around 1.25 tons per acre. The age of the vines, not the farming, is what holds the crop down.
The Wines
Corison's Kronos Vineyard Cabernet is the estate's deepest and slowest wine, made in the same low-alcohol, high-acid register as the rest of the house: dried black currant, violet and graphite over fine-grained tannin, built to run for decades rather than to show early.