Video:Tour of the Kuleto Winery

Transcript:Tour of the Kuleto Winery

Hi, I'm Dave Lattin, here for about.com. I'm the Winemaker here at Kuleto Estate Winery in St. Helena, and today I'm going to give you a tour of our beautiful mountain estate.

Facts About Kuleto Winery

Kuleto Estate was founded in the early '90s by restauranteur, Pat Kuleto, who still owns 680 of the 760 acres. In spring 2009, the brand and the winery was purchased by Foley Family Wines. Kuleto Estate Winery is located due East of the town of Rutherford, high above the Napa Valley.

Getting to Kuleto Winery

To reach us, you cross the Silverado Trail, take Highway 128, and from there it's about a 25 minute drive to our gate. The estate is comprised of 760 total acres, only 90 of which are planted to grapes. Within those 90 acres, we have 115 separate vineyard blocks; each one could be viewed as its own vineyard, and from that I get a wide array of flavors, styles, and structures of wines every year to make our wines.

Other Information About Kuleto Winery

We are an estate-grown vineyard, which means we grow all our own fruit – we don't bring any up here, and we don't sell any. We grow 11 different varieties here; not because it makes a lot of marketing sense, but because the property is so diverse we can grow just about anything up here.

Varietals at Kuleto Winery

Now, of course, we're in the middle of big Cabernet country, so that is the predominant variety, and from that variety we produce six different Cabernets. But in addition to that, we're also producing Syrah, and Zinfandel, and Sangiovese. We do small bottlings of Cabernet Franc, Chardonnay. One of the unique aspects of visiting our property is being greeted with a glass of wine after coming up our long driveway, and then taking a walk out to the point (next to the founder's villa), and from there you look at the entire Napa Valley, and really see where this property sits in relation to the entire valley.

Fun Facts About Visiting Kuleto Winery

On your first visit to Kuleto Estate not only will you taste the estate Cabernet, the wine that you're probably most familiar with, but at least six other wines that we produce here from the estate. Follow-up visits might also include special food and wine pairings, or a wine tasting that we call "Winemaker's Whim," which you would come and you would visit with me, and you would follow me around whatever I was doing that day -- it might include a blending trial down in the cellar, a vertical tasting of wines where I'm writing up notes for the newsletter.

The benefit of visiting Kuleto Estate is the visit is never the same twice, and we have many, many repeat customers here. Kuleto Estate is open seven days a week, but by appointment only, so please give us a phone call or visit our website to set that up. I hope you've enjoyed this tour of Kuleto Estate Winery, and we all hope to see you sometime soon here.

Thanks for watching. To learn more, you can visit us on the web at About.com.