Regusci Winery

Field decisions before cellar decisions

The choice begins in the vineyard, before the cellar receives the fruit. Bill Nancarrow, winemaker at Regusci Winery in Napa, works from that order: viticulture and enology held as one discipline, not two neighboring trades. His path to this station started in vineyard work, first as Harvest Manager at Thorncroft Vineyards in England, then in Hawkes Bay, New Zealand, where he joined Huthlee Vineyards as a team member from 1995. By 1998 he had moved into cellar responsibility as Assistant Winemaker at C.J. Pask Winery, later rising to winemaker there.

Napa gave that field-and-cellar training a larger frame. In 2001, Nancarrow arrived at Duckhorn Vineyards as a harvest worker, then became Assistant Winemaker, and later served as Executive Winemaker at Duckhorn Vineyards and Executive Winemaker at Paraduxx. At Regusci, the role is narrower in name and broad in practice. The house credits him as winemaker for the 2018 The Elders Cabernet Sauvignon, a wine that places his current work inside the Stags Leap District ranch rather than apart from it.

A ranch wine made from both sides of the line

Regusci describes its work through estate-grown wines, with Cabernet Sauvignon, Chardonnay, Merlot, Syrah, and Zinfandel among the varieties tied to the property. The named bottles give the program its shape: The Patriarch, a red blend typically built from Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot; Angelo's Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon; The Matrona, a Merlot-based blend; and The Elders Cabernet Sauvignon. The house does not need a split vocabulary for vineyard and cellar here. Its stated craft specialty is viticulture and enology, which means the farming decision and the winemaking decision answer to the same finished glass.

That matters at a ranch with long agricultural memory. The Regusci family has farmed this land for five generations since 1932, and the property still carries the T.L. Grigsby-Occidental Winery, a stone ghost winery built in 1878 for gravity-flow winemaking. Limited production is part of the house language, with attention to the hand in when to pick, how to receive fruit, and how to keep Cabernet Sauvignon from losing its line between ripeness and structure.

Stone, garden, and the tasting room

The cellar sits within a working ranch rather than a detached hospitality set. The old Occidental stone building gives the place its heaviest register, while the culinary garden, olive groves, and citrus orchards keep the property in daily agriculture. There is an honor-system farm stand on the ranch, a small detail that says more about the house than a polished phrase could. The Butchery, once used as a slaughterhouse, now holds offices and meeting space, another working building kept in circulation.

In the tasting room and on the terrace, the wines carry that agricultural frame back to the glass. The room is not separate from the vineyard story; it is where the ranch's decisions become legible to someone who did not walk the rows that morning. The bottle that names the current bench is Bill Nancarrow's 2018 The Elders Cabernet Sauvignon.