Although he’s received his share of accolades—including a “Winemaker of the Year” nod from the
San Francisco Chronicle in 2017—and his wines are found on top restaurant lists all over the country, Dan Petroski says his Massican wines remain firmly in the “niche” category. I don’t know how that’s possible, given the mass of glowing press they’ve received, and further, a wine like today’s “Annia,” a laser-focused white crafted from an “Italian-American” blend of grapes, feels like a ‘wine of the moment’ to me.
Maybe I’m living in a sommelier/restaurant bubble, but I’ve seen the California white wine paradigm shifting away from big, blowsy, and buttery and towards crisp, clean and aromatic for some time now—with Massican at the leading edge of that trend. Petroski, in fact, has done something I’m not sure anyone else has ever done: Create a winery solely focused on whites in the middle of the Napa Valley, with Napa Valley vineyards providing the source material. Although his primary inspirations for Massican are the bright, bracing, yet textural whites of Italy’s Friuli-Venezia Giulia region, you can’t help noticing kindred qualities to the greats of the Loire and Chablis, too. Other white wine producers in Napa have shown that bright, modestly oaked whites are very much in Napa’s wheelhouse—Stony Hill for one, Matthiasson for another—but Petroski is all-in on that mission at Massican. Today’s shimmering, mineral, sneakily powerful “Annia” hammers the point home. Do yourself a favor and check it out: It is so, so good.
It’s important to note that Petroski has grown his Massican label while maintaining a rather prestigious “day job”—that of winemaker at Napa’s acclaimed Larkmead Winery, where he crafts some seriously sumptuous Cabernets. As the Chronicle’s Esther Mobley put it, “It’s the rare winemaker who can contain multitudes such as these: to forge a style of wine as original and unmoored as Massican while upholding the epitome of the American wine establishment, Napa Valley Cabernet.”
A devoted student of wine who once worked in the magazine business in New York, Petroski started getting seriously into wine in the late-’90s and eventually dove in headlong—moving to Italy to stage at Sicily’s Valle dell’Acate winery. He later moved to California in 2006, landing a harvest internship at DuMol, and from there, as the saying goes, the die was cast. He’s been at Larkmead for 12 years now and founded Massican in 2009, naming today’s wine for his Italian-American mother, Annia. The name Massican, meanwhile, refers to Monte Massico in Italy’s Campania region, a historic winemaking area and the land of his ancestors. And while Massican wines have recently come to incorporate “Campanian” grapes such as Greco di Tufo, the principal inspiration for the lineup is the stainless steel-fermented style of white wine perfected in Friuli-Venezia Giulia in the ’90s and early 2000s (the era before skin-contact “orange” whites became fashionable).
The Massican lineup now includes a Napa Sauvignon Blanc and a Chardonnay from the famed Hyde Vineyard in Carneros, but the heart and soul are the two Italian-inspired blends: “Gemina,” which combines Pinot Grigio and Greco; and today’s “Annia,” a blend of Friulano (46%), Ribolla Gialla (41%) and a little bit of Hyde Vineyard Chardonnay (11%). The most fascinating aspect of Annia is that the Friulano (a.k.a. “Tocai Friulano”) was originally planted in 1946 by the Nichelini family, in Napa’s easterly Chiles Valley. The Ribolla Gialla, meanwhile, boasts 18 years of vine age, having been planted by legendary Napa vintner George Vare. If you are surprised that two relatively obscure northeastern Italian varieties have been planted in Napa Valley for so long, well, I was, too. But perhaps we shouldn’t be, given the huge impact Italian immigrants have had on the California wine industry since its very beginnings.
Petroski’s wines are characterized by very modest alcohol levels and minimal oak, and the 2018 Annia is true to form in that regard. All three varieties are harvested and vinified separately in a mixture of used French oak and stainless steel tank and then blended six weeks before bottling. In the spirit of the mineral Mediterranean whites that inspired it, Annia is the kind of “fresh” white that’s released in the spring following the vintage, and while it is indeed drinkable on release, I also find the wines eminently age-able—as in years, not months. The acidity, minerality, and balance are all there for cellaring, meaning that what is now an aromatic, racy, diamond-cut white is going to add layers of weight and complexity over time. In the glass, it’s a medium yellow-gold with hints of silver and green, with perfumed aromas of white peach, apricot, lemon verbena, citrus peel, wildflower honey, cut hay, and wet stones. Even at this young stage, it is showing nice integration and some sneaky depth to the texture (Friulano is no slouch in the extract department, especially in a climate like Napa’s). Interestingly, there’s also a slight saline mineral note suggestive of a “coastal” wine, which it is not. There’s some real
Chablisienne nerve to this white that’ll serve it well alongside lemony seafood preparations now and over the next 5-7 years. If you didn’t think Napa could do nervy, trust me—this wine will show you the light!
