Lately I have spent much of my free time reflecting on change. How is it that after years of pursuing knowledge and stumbling upon experience that we somehow remain the same person? Is any trace of our former selves left within us after time passes? If so, how do we know?

It seems to me that change gains its significance from the anchors we drop at important ports of call throughout our life. Whether it is a particular belief, an achievement that lay the ground for what was to come, or a significant person, these anchors also serve as lookout points from which we can survey from where we have come and how we have changed.

In my world of wine experiences, Brown Estate in California’s Napa Valley is one of these anchors. My first visit there a mere year and a half ago fostered my now deep seated philosophy that wine is about how personality, belief and passion marry with time and place. If I am missing any of these components, then my experience with a wine isn’t quite complete.

Personality, belief and passion are rarely separable. This is something I understand each time I return to Brown Estate. On this, my third visit, I had the opportunity to think back on where my life was a mere year and a half earlier and how much I have changed both personally and professionally in this time. Driving up to the unassuming gate of the estate, my body also viscerally recalled the warmth this winery has managed to create in my heart. It was this uncontrolled immediate response that made me realize I had found the perfect place to look out and survey what had come before.

And now I understand why I felt what I did. While wine is objective in many ways, it is also deeply embedded in human experience. Any attempt to remove it from this experience will fail before it even begins. Wine is also cultural, and one’s choices of what one drinks have implications that are both immediately human and more broadly cultural.

If this is true, wine can be both a home and the possibility for a new voyage. It is exactly the kind of Odyssean voyage I wrote about after my first visit to Brown that draws one to what one loves best at the same time as it creates new experiences. On a human scale Brown is both a place to which I can return and a site of constantly evolving experiences. Culturally, Brown represents what I want wine to become in North America: an embedded part of our deepest beliefs and our greatest passions that only makes sense when shared.

Coral Brown beautifully summed up what I think is a core belief of the estate when she told me “Never give up an opportunity to taste something new; your palate never forgets.” This core belief expresses itself in the Brown’s approach to wine, which is counter to most of the dominant trends in California these days. This is, simply, that each wine has its own personality and its own experiences that make it what it is – no makeup and no apology required. When Coral poured their 2005 Chaos Theory (a co-fermented zinfandel and cabernet blend) she described the wine as a long term relationship where each person had so altered the other that they created a single harmonious blend. She contrasted this to the 2007 Chaos Theory (which was not co-fermented, but blended after fermentation), which she called a meeting of two passionate lovers, with each grape pushing to express its intensity.

Wine again became personality when Coral introduced me to her mother and father, who live on the estate, after pouring a glass of their supple and intellectual 2000 Cabernet Sauvignon. Her father, a man as subtle as the wine I was drinking, was also the most intriguing and thoughtful person I’ve met on a winery visit. A physician, he spends a tremendous amount of his time thinking of the deep issues involved in providing health care to those who have the hardest time accessing it, whether for financial or other reasons. I found my conversation with him both inspiring and humbling.

This is not Napa. The Browns are not ex-silicon valley CEOs with money to burn and a ‘passion’ for prestige wine making. Rather, the two senior Browns purchased the estate and its Abraham Lincoln era house as a get-away home and not as a winery. It was the children – Coral, Deneen and David – who decided to start growing grapes and sharing their story through the wines they make.

They also happened upon what I think is one of the great zinfandel terroirs in the whole of California. The mistake most critics make with the Chiles Valley AVA (where Brown is located) is to treat it as a single monolithic terroir. This is simply wrong. The AVA is quite large and there are huge microclimate differences within the region.

What makes Brown so special is that it is the last place moving inland from the San Pablo Bay where the fog penetrates before burning off. This makes Brown’s vineyards the coolest in the entire AVA, and some of the coolest in all of California. This means their Zins are far from ordinary and have much zippier acidity and consequently superior balance to almost any other expression of the grape I have tasted.

Zinfandel is the perfect grape for the Browns – it is sensuous, exuberant and full of life. However, in the hands of the Browns it is also elegant, balanced and extremely pure. The wines are also extremely true to and expressive of vintage. The 2008 Napa Valley Zinfandel possesses an unparalleled delicacy of aromatic expression that reflects the colder and wetter growing season. The Browns had to throw away a significant portion of their grapes, but the resulting wines are elegant, pretty and lively in the mouth. Their 2008s will prove to be the most food friendly and versatile of their wines just as the 2007s were, while less versatile, bolder and more intense.

The 2008 Westside Zinfandel offers darker fruits and a handful of freshly crushed cloves when inhaled. The wine is richer than the Napa Valley Zin, and quite dense. However, it is very well balanced and is long and expressive despite the characteristically high alcohol of Zinfandel.

But the most emblematic wine I tasted is also the one most unlike anything else they make. In 2002, when the Browns were first starting to make and bottle their own wines, they had not yet completed a temperature controlled winery in which to ferment their juice. It so happened that while the zinfandel was fermenting outside in tank, the temperature was so low outside that David Brown could not get the fermentation to a high enough temperature. They feared the worst and assumed the wines were worthless.

Several years later they opened a bottle and discovered that not only had the wine aged gracefully, but it was also one of the most unique expressions of Zinfandel they had ever tasted. The 2002 Napa Valley Zinfandel had a nose not unlike a richer Beaujolais cru, with crushed rocks and flowers. The low fermentation temperature somehow held back the richness of the Zinfandel while giving it prettier and softer aromatics than one would expect. It is a singular wine that speaks of time, accident, place, personality, belief, and passion. All in a single bottle of wine from an ugly duckling vintage.

Incidentally, while writing this article I opened the one bottle of 2002 Chiles Valley Zinfandel I had saved back from when I first visited the Browns. It is still drinking well, despite seeing a bit of heat shock in last summer’s heat wave in Vancouver. The pretty aromatics have started to mellow and I am now noticing more baking spices and cherry fruit. But the wine retains such an extremely delicate texture that is simply, and extraordinarily, singular.

It is with such wines of passion, power, sensuality, complexity and true vintage expression that Brown estate has become an anchor in my journey through wine. As I drift away from the heavy and fruity wines of Napa, I remain beholden with the people and the wines of Brown Estate. Somehow, amongst the morass of what Napa has become, the Browns have created an enclave for authenticity, honesty, and utter attentiveness to the personality and terroir they have been blessed with. I am fortunate that they have become an anchor and a lookout from which I can better understand how much I have changed and how much more I have to explore.

There are a few precious moments in a wine drinker’s life that precipitate a feeling of perfectly elaborated poise, reflection, and exuberance. In my experience such moments often arise in the most unassuming of circumstances – perhaps the unassuming serves to soften cynicism and provide a kind of philosophical carte blanche for an experience. Whatever the reason such moments arise, my recent visit to Brown Estate Vineyards in Napa will now hold a special place in my heart for offering up just such a wink in my otherwise quotidian existence.

Brown Estate is a first generation family winery, built by the children of the original purchasers of the property, which had been abandoned for many decades beforehand. The estate itself is simple, unassuming, and clearly a labour of love. We began our visit with a tour of the property by Celia Brown, coupled with well-furnished stories of how the estate became established and how it transformed into a respected small family winery that occupies the relatively new Chiles Valley AVA. Our discussion eventually moved into the creation of the wine cellar, which is perhaps one of the most beautiful in the valley. The Browns decided not to smooth down the blasted space mainly due to budgetary restrictions. However, the result is a wonderfully asymmetrical and mysterious wine cave that holds about as much personality as the Brown family themselves.

The cellar cleverly moved into the tasting room where Coral Brown was pouring an extensive lineup of absolutely incredible wines and thoughtfully suggested cheese pairings. In stark opposition to most of Napa’s either commercial or high-falutin’ tasting rooms, Brown opts for dim lighting, pop, R&B, Hip Hop and a friendly chatty vibe. In a land of sun, fruit, and well-heeled boomers, it takes an uncommon integrity to stay authentic not only to one’s style, but also to one’s soul. And Brown, if nothing else, makes wine with soul.

We started with the 2006 Chardonnay, which was not only full of ripe tropical fruit, and an explosive and expansive mid-palate, but had a character and complexity well beyond almost any other Napa chard I have tasted. This was perhaps due to the fantastic combination of expansive fruit with cutting minerality and a complete dearth of malolactic fermentation. Using only 10% new oak, somehow this wine still maintained very full structure and layering that extended well into the 45+ second finish. Absolutely stunning. Excellent+. $48 at the winery.

The 2007 Napa Valley Zinfandel is Brown’s signature and most widely available wine, and is blended from four blocks at their estate. If zinfandel has terroir, then this is it: dried cranberry and cherry on a nose that I could sniff for hours on end. The palate had more cranberry and layered red fruits with asian spices. This stood out due to its very deep layering of flavour and surprising elegance. No residual heat will be found here. The best zinfandel I’ve had – well at least until the next wine in the tasting! Excellent+. $36 at the winery and private stores.

If zin could be perfect, then the 2007 Chiles Valley Zinfandel would be the instantiation of that perfection. Sitting at 15.7% ABV, you would never guess that with the extreme structure and tannic grip of this wine. Again, there is a nose of dried cranberry – suggesting the uniqueness of this site – but with a depth and length beyond the basic Napa bottling. As Coral explained, the Chiles Valley zin’s structured acidity is the result of the unique site, which sees massive temperature drops during ripening season, which keeps the fruit very lively. A beautiful wine, zinfandel or not. Excellent+. $45.

We were fortunate enough to be given the opportunity to also taste the 2002 Chiles Valley Zinfandel alongside the 2007. The 2002 is so unique that in a blind tasting I think it could be mistaken for a Burgundy village wine or a Cru Beaujolais. Astonishingly, this zinfandel had a perfumed nose of flowers, light red berries, and spice. The palate was very much like an old world pinot, with layers of barny funk, spice, strawberrys, and cranberries. Power with finesse, acidity with fruit, this is an incredibly versatile wine. So much so, in fact, that apparently the Valley’s chefs have been loving this wine as a superb pairing with a wide variety of foods. This is the kind of wine that makes you question your preconceptions. Excellent+. $38 at the winery.

If Brown’s creations were the alpha and omega of zinfandel, they would still deserve a shining gold star in my opinion. However, the next two wines show that this is no simple family operation. Somehow Brown seems to understand wine at a deep level as all of the bottlings I tasted managed to reach directly into what makes wine so special, so unique, and so utterly able to stop you in your tracks. That said, the 2003 Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon had a rocking nose of ripe black cherry with an almost port-like density, and a very distinct fruit-cake character. On the palate this was dense, dark, brooding and tannic, but also soft enough to drink now. This could also age, and be the better for it. Excellent to Excellent+. $65 at the winery.

I suppose that realizing that they rock at making both zinfandel and cabernet, Brown figured why not blend the two together! The result of that hypothetical motivation is the 2005 Chaos Theory, a blend of zin and cab that has big fruity and peppery flavours up front, but a more cabernet-like structure in the mid and back palate. Very unique, and sure to be loved by both zin and cab afficionados. Excellent to Excellent+. $45.

If all that was not enough, we ended our tasting with the 2006 Arrested Zinfandel, a zinfandel port at 20% abv and about 10% residual sugar fortified with house-made brandy. Yes, this is sweet – but it does not lack in acidity and, accordingly, freshness. Distinctly zin on the nose this was all rich and creamy with clear butterscotch components on the palate. Fresh, alive, and plenty full of flavour, this was very nicely done. However, if I had to choose, I would go for their dry wines over this. Excellent. $48 for the half bottle.

If I can be permitted to indulge in one more philosophical observation, my experience at Brown felt like home on an Odyssean journey through the world of wine. Such moments are rare, and should be cherished. The Brown family should be commended – and please do seek them out if you are ever in Napa. Thanks kindly to the Browns for giving us the opportunity to meet them, taste their wines, and get a glimpse at one of Napa’s most singular wineries.