Blankiet Estate

Cold fruit before the cellar turns warm

The fruit rests through a week of cold maceration before fermentation begins; Graeme MacDonald, winemaker at Blankiet Estate in Yountville, works from that pause toward the finished wine. His station here is the seam between farming and cellar, a role he held by 2016 after training in Viticulture and Enology at the University of California, Davis. The discipline suits a hillside estate where the vineyard asks to be read closely rather than corrected late. MacDonald is also a fourth-generation Napa Valley wine grower, and his own language keeps returning to place, soil, and the obligation to leave the ground alive for those who come next. At Blankiet, that ethic meets Paradise Hills Vineyard, the steep estate site Claude and Katherine Blankiet began developing after their 46-acre purchase in 1996. The founders wanted Bordeaux-style wines from the western foothills of the Mayacamas Mountains, above Yountville, with power held in shape by farming and restraint. MacDonald’s task is not to make the hillside louder. It is to keep its line clean.

Paradise Hills worked back into itself

The vineyard program is organic, with soil balance treated as part of the method rather than scenery around it. Between the rows, the estate uses winter grasses and legumes, including clover, winter rye, sorghum, and sweet peas; in spring, that growth is mowed and spaded back into the ground as green manure. The gesture is old farming, not decoration. It returns nutrients, protects structure, and keeps the vine’s work tied to the life of the soil. The site itself is steep, rocky, and volcanic, with stones, volcanic ash, and clay shaping the way water, heat, and root pressure move through the rows. Natural protection from hot afternoon sun lets maturation extend roughly ten days later than valley-floor or west-facing vineyards, a small delay with real consequences in Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and the estate’s Bordeaux blends. In the cellar, each pick ferments separately in small custom-made stainless steel tanks. The house describes wines made without fining or filtration, and its flagship wines have been raised in 100% new French oak; other bottlings have seen 18 months in equal parts new and second-fill French oak barrels. The choices are measured around texture, fruit character, and the vineyard’s own cadence.

Under the hill, after the rows

The estate is quiet by design. The approach belongs to a hillside property rather than a public tasting corridor: vines above Yountville, the Mayacamas foothills close around the rows, and deep underground caves leading inward before the tasting room opens again to a more composed register. The cellar, the vineyard, and the room are not separate moods here. They read as one estate system, with the hospitality built around Paradise Hills as the source of the wines rather than around a wide Napa itinerary. Comparative tastings fit that structure because the wines return to the same ground from different angles, Proprietary Red beside Rive Droite, Mythicvs, Prince of Hearts, or Prince of Hearts Rosé. The room stays low in volume. The hillside does most of the talking.

A small portfolio with a long memory

Blankiet keeps its portfolio narrow enough for vintage to matter visibly. The named wines form a compact family, led by Proprietary Red and Rive Droite, with Mythicvs, Prince of Hearts, and Prince of Hearts Rosé filling out the estate’s language. That focus gives MacDonald a clear set of questions each season: how the hillside ripened, how the separate picks speak after fermentation, how much frame the barrels should give without covering the site. If there is a next movement to hold in view, it is not a new spectacle, but the next reading of Paradise Hills Vineyard in Blankiet Estate Rive Droite.