Failla Wines

Indigenous yeast at a St. Helena bench

Indigenous yeast starts the work before the polish arrives. Ehren Jordan, winemaker at Failla Wines in St. Helena, keeps the cellar pointed toward cool-climate Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Syrah, with a hand that came through pressure rather than ornament. His own account of the 1993 harvest is plain about what formed him: “It rained every day during harvest [in 1993], and seeing what people did to make wine -- and make some good wine -- was incredibly instructive.” The lesson was not romance. It was weather, judgment, and the daily choice to keep fruit moving when conditions refused to cooperate.

Jordan joined Helen Turley at Marcassin in California in 1995, then worked at Turley Wine Cellars in Napa Valley as winemaker and general manager until 2013. Since 1998, he has been owner and winemaker of Failla, joining independence to long repetition. That continuity matters in a house built around marine-influenced vineyards and small production rather than scale. The line through the work is clear enough: formal study, harvest pressure, California cellars, and a personal hand in the bottle.

Cool-climate fruit, left with its grain

Failla’s program is built around Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Syrah, with Zinfandel, Chenin Blanc and Viognier also in the house vocabulary. The wines are described through sustainable practice, indigenous yeast and unfiltered technique, a set of choices that asks the cellar to preserve texture rather than sand it down.

That smallness is not a decorative claim when the range depends on site sensitivity. Chardonnay and Pinot Noir change quickly under too much handling; Syrah can lose its edge if the cellar pushes for weight instead of line. Jordan’s known signature wines, Alban Vineyard Viognier and Que Syrah Syrah, sit outside a narrow definition of Napa expectation and help explain the breadth of the bench here. Failla’s St. Helena address may place the tasting room in Cabernet country, but the cellar’s attention runs toward cooler fruit and marine influence.

A cabin, a cave, a steep hillside

The room receives the work quietly. Failla’s tasting room is a cozy 1920s cabin, with knotted-wood walls, a stone hearth, living room seating areas, and a porch that lets the pace loosen without turning the place theatrical. Outside, a redwood-shaded lawn and a small dry-farmed Zinfandel vineyard sit on the steep hillside property; inside, the wine caves pull the setting back toward cellar temperature and stone.

There is an intimacy to that arrangement that suits the wines. The counter does not need spectacle when the method has already chosen restraint. Glass, wood, hillside and cave do enough. If the future here is not announced through a dated release or named handoff, the present still gives a useful close: Jordan’s cellar keeps returning to indigenous yeast, unfiltered texture, and the small dry-farmed Zinfandel vineyard above Failla’s 1920s cabin.