As fruit from our 40th vintage makes its way from vine to cellar, I can’t help but feel reflective. Celebrating a milestone brings a certain clarity, and I find myself thinking about how we got here—and how it has shaped the wine we’re sharing with you now.
Pahlmeyer was born from a bold ambition. Jayson Pahlmeyer wanted to create his own “California Mouton”—a rich, powerful Napa Valley Bordeaux blend that would leave a lasting impression. He took some pretty big risks to make it happen, and that vision came to life with the 1986 Pahlmeyer Proprietary Red, made by Randy Dunn.
With Pahlmeyer’s 40th harvest underway, I’m especially excited to share what I believe is our most exciting Proprietary Red bottling in the past fifteen years. Tasting through decades of this flagship wine, I can trace both its consistency and the subtle shifts that come with time. Vintage to vintage, the essential mandate has endured: make a wine intended to inspire awe, guided by Napa Valley mountain fruit, First Growth Bordeaux inspiration, and an unwavering refusal to compromise.
The 2023 Proprietary Red is, quite simply, one of the finest wines I’ve had the privilege to make. A cool, unhurried growing season allowed each of our high-elevation sites to express itself with remarkable clarity, yielding a wine of profound elegance and quiet power: layered, structured, and built to evolve for decades.
It feels fitting to share it now as the latest culmination of that legacy, a reminder that the ambition we started with is still very much in the glass. Evolution is in the details; constancy is in the soul.
— Katie Vogt, Winemaker
Stagecoach Vineyard Harvest, September 2026
