Hundred Acre Winery: A Rare Look Inside Jayson Woodbridge's Napa Estate

Calistoga, October 2026. By Greg Martellotto, founder of Big Hammer Wines. Photos: Big Hammer Wines.

Hundred Acre doesn't have a tasting room. Not a real one. No bar, no flight menu, no gift shop full of logo corkscrews.

Jayson Woodbridge never saw the point. Dana, who runs hospitality for him, explained it while she poured: wine is only as good as the people you share it with. That's what they toast to, every single time someone sits down at the table.

On a Monday this October, we sat down at that table on a trade visit, at the newest and least-seen corner of the Hundred Acre world: Private Road, the estate south of Calistoga that Woodbridge bought in 2024. Hundred Acre isn't open to the public, so very few people get to. Dana poured four wines, two of them new 2023 releases that most mailing-list members hadn't even received yet. Then she spent the afternoon telling us about the man, the vineyards and the rules behind some of the most highly scored Cabernet ever made in America.

This is everything we learned. If you've ever wondered what's behind those five gold stars, pull up a chair.

Where We Sat: Private Road, Hundred Acre's Newest Estate

We didn't taste at The Ring, the cave winery under the Ark vineyard. Dana hosted us at Private Road, the former Kelly Fleming estate in Simmons Canyon, just south of Calistoga. Woodbridge bought it in 2024, it sits right next to his Few and Far Between vineyard, and not a drop of wine from it has been released yet.

Our hosts asked us not to publish photos of the house or the cellar, so I'll paint them in words.

We pulled in under low cloud on a Monday morning. The vines run right up to the buildings. Two tall palms stand over a sunken stone courtyard, where rust-orange cushions are set around a stone fireplace. Behind it all, the canyon climbs in dry grass and oak, with a few bare gray trunks still standing among the green. The 2020 Glass Fire damaged this property, and the hillside hasn't forgotten.

The main building is rough-cut stone, with a round window high in the gable and a navy-and-white striped awning. Black steel-framed glass doors open onto a terracotta terrace, where a long outdoor table is set with folding bistro chairs. At the far end there's an outdoor kitchen built of the same stone, with a wood-fired oven and a grill.

Inside, the tasting room is stone walls, arched doorways and dark timber beams, lit by brass lamps. There's a deep leather Chesterfield, a cabinet faced in sea-green tile, a portrait painted in pale blues, and a long wooden table where Dana had the bottles waiting. Even the chair backs carry stars.

Then the cave. A straight tunnel runs into the hillside under a rough arched ceiling, with barrels stacked two high along both walls and a pool of light at the far end. The barrel heads we could read were stamped Hundred Acre. Off to one side is a smaller chamber hung with a wrought-iron chandelier, its arched black-steel doors opening onto shelves of wooden cases.

It's a long way from a tasting bar, which is exactly the point. More on that below.

The Banker Who Bet Everything on Clay

Jayson Woodbridge grew up in Toronto and made his first career in investment banking. He'd been walking vineyards in Canada, Switzerland and France since 1989, but he had never made a bottle of wine.

Then, in the late 1990s, he walked into work one day and quit. He moved his whole family to the Napa Valley. Four kids, all under the age of three.

Jim Barbour, one of the most respected vineyard managers in Napa, drove him to more than 200 vineyards. At some of them, Dana says, Jayson didn't even get out of the car. He was waiting to feel something. Ask him today and he'll tell you this was preordained: he felt it the moment he stepped on the right ground, and he believes this is what he was put here to do.

He bought a hillside east of St. Helena in 1999. The vineyard that would make his name came a year later: nine acres east of the Silverado Trail. It had been a Sauvignon Blanc block until Barbour replanted it to Cabernet in 1996. Woodbridge bought it in August 2000.

Underneath the vines: clay.

That raised eyebrows. Cabernet wants warm, fast-draining ground, and clay is cool and holds water. Nobody in Napa planted their most valuable grape on it on purpose. Here was a banker with no winemaking background paying serious money for it, and then launching with the 2000 vintage, a year critics largely wrote off across the valley. The trade, Dana remembers, had a name for him: the crazy Canadian.

The clay had the last word. Philippe Melka, who made those first vintages before Woodbridge took over the winemaking himself in 2002, compared the soils to Petrus and Ausone in Bordeaux. When a soil dig was finally done years later, Dana says, it found smectite, the same kind of blue clay that sits under Petrus in Pomerol. Asked about Hundred Acre's success, Melka told Decanter it's "all him."

If the name Woodbridge rings a different bell, it should. He also created Layer Cake, Cherry Pie and If You See Kay, the value labels he sold in 2018. Same man, opposite end of the wine shelf.

Two Stories Behind the Name (and It Isn't 100 Acres)

First, the fact everyone agrees on. Hundred Acre is not a hundred acres. The estate Cabernet comes from fewer than 30 planted acres spread across three vineyards.

So where does the name come from? It depends who you ask.

The story Dana tells: Woodbridge's first purchase, in 1999, was a house on a hillside east of St. Helena. His kids played on that hill all day. At night he read them their favorite bedtime story, Winnie-the-Pooh. The hillside became their Hundred Acre Wood, and when it came time to name the winery, the name was waiting. That hillside is now the Ark vineyard.

The story Woodbridge told Decanter: the Pooh connection is a myth writers keep repeating. For him, the name recalls the woods he ran through as a young long-distance runner near his childhood home. "My own private forest of childhood memories," he called it.

Pick your favorite. Both end on the same hillside.

And here's the twist. Since 2024, the family's holdings really do top a hundred acres. They're closer to 400, after Woodbridge bought the 286-acre Kelly Fleming estate in Calistoga's Simmons Canyon, right next to Few and Far Between. It's now called Private Road. That's where we tasted, and nothing from it has been released yet.

Three Vineyards, Named for Family

Almost every vineyard Woodbridge owns is named for someone in his family. Even the label is a family portrait: the five gold stars stand for Jayson and his four children.

All three estate Cabernets are made exactly the same way. Same farming, same cellar, same new oak, same man deciding. The only variable is the dirt. That makes tasting them side by side one of the cleanest lessons in terroir Napa has to offer.

Morgan's Way (formerly Kayli Morgan): St. Helena, 9 Acres

This is the original vineyard, the clay one, bought in 2000. It was called Kayli Morgan, after a family friend and Woodbridge's daughter, Morgan, until the 2019 vintage. That year he renamed it Morgan's Way. As Dana tells it, he decided it was time Morgan got her way.

If you drive south on the Silverado Trail, it's on your left. In season the front is covered in pink, white and purple wildflowers. There's no sign, only a small stone marker with a copper plate and five stars. That's how you know.

Here's how the clay works. It cracks and crumbles as it heats and cools, which lets the roots work their way down. There's an aquifer underneath, so the vines go deep for water and nutrients. And the vineyard sits in the runoff from Glass Mountain, so the soil is littered with obsidian. That black volcanic glass soaks up heat during the day and, in Dana's words, wraps the vines in a blanket at night. Cabernet likes to be warm, and the obsidian makes up for the cool clay.

The result is always the most aromatic of the three wines, and the most giving when young. Woodbridge himself calls it the feminine one. Dana's line: Morgan's Way greets you as you come to the glass. If someone tells her they love Old World wine, this is the bottle she pours them. It has a little more iron and a lot more perfume.

Ark: St. Helena, Below Glass Mountain

Ark is the hillside where it all started, acquired in 1999. It's a natural amphitheater at the base of Glass Mountain and Howell Mountain, off Crystal Springs Road. The vines sit on steep south-facing slopes that curve through a 180-degree arc of sun, half facing east and half facing west.

The name works twice. It's the arc the sun draws across the vineyard. And Woodbridge has a son named Noah. Noah's Ark.

The soil is a vertical layer cake of ancient red beach soils, black obsidian and volcanic pebbles. On a slope this steep, most growers plant rows across the hill so the crews can work it. Woodbridge didn't want any vine to have a sunny side and a shady side. So the rows run straight up and down the hill, all the way around the bowl.

Below the vineyard is The Ring, the cave winery where every Hundred Acre wine has been made since 2005. That's also the year of the first Ark bottling.

Ark is the tighter, darker, more mineral wine. Think tobacco leaf, black olive and dark fruit, with a stony edge that Dana says has become more pronounced in recent vintages. It's built to age. She says the 2005, the very first Ark, is still one of the best wines she has ever had.

Few and Far Between: Calistoga

Few and Far Between came later. Woodbridge bought the Calistoga property in 2008 and released the first wine from that vintage. It has about five planted acres on a much larger ranch, mostly Cabernet Sauvignon with a little Cabernet Franc.

The name is a family joke. His eldest son is Fisher, whose initials spell F-E-W.

It lives up to the name. Of the three single-vineyard wines, Few and Far Between is the hardest to get.

Wraith, Holy Quest and the Blends

Wraith blends all three estate vineyards. It's meant to be a snapshot of the whole vintage rather than of one piece of ground. Holy Quest is a selection of Wraith barrels, made only in years Woodbridge thinks are worth it. It debuted with the 2021 vintage. We have the 2022 Wraith in a three-bottle case.

Here's the catch Dana pointed out. All of it comes from the same small set of estate vineyards. There's no outside fruit. So every bottle of Wraith is one fewer bottle of Morgan's Way, Ark or Few and Far Between. In a year when Woodbridge loves the blend more than the single vineyards, there's simply less single-vineyard wine to go around.

The critics have noticed. Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW gave six of Hundred Acre's 2021 wines a perfect 100 points: Holy Quest, Ark, Dark Ark, Few and Far Between, Morgan's Way and Wraith. Six perfect scores from one estate in one vintage.

The Rules Jayson Woodbridge Never Bends

Ask Dana to describe her boss and she reaches for black and white. Things are, or they aren't. A wine is great, or it isn't. "There's no gray," she says. Here's what that looks like in practice.

A barrel that isn't good enough goes down the drain. It doesn't get sold off in bulk to another winery, and it doesn't get shuffled into a cheaper label. That's why Fortunate Son, his other Napa label, is not a Hundred Acre second wine. Dana insists that isn't a technicality. He never wants to give himself an out.

The wine comes out when it's ready, not when the calendar says. Woodbridge tastes the wines in spring. If they aren't ready, the release gets pushed, no matter what the sales team had planned. Dana has watched it happen.

No discounts. Ever. In Dana's words, he would rather keep the wine and drink it than sell it for less.

The label tells you the real alcohol. Hundred Acre usually lands around 15.5 percent, and one year Dana remembers it at 16.1. US label law gives wines over 14 percent a one-point margin either way. Years ago Burgess, Woodbridge's very first employee, pointed out that they could print a lower number. Woodbridge's answer, as Dana tells it: great, so we'll put 16.5 on it? He picks for flavor, not for a number. The alcohol is simply where the best wine lands that year, and he has nothing to hide.

For the record, we didn't taste heat in any of the wines. More on that below.

The farming is extreme. The estate vineyards are farmed organically. Woodbridge spreads around 50 tons of mushroom compost per acre where 20 is the usual recommendation, and the vines are thinned to one cluster per shoot. Barbour has farmed every Hundred Acre vineyard from the start.

A bad year means no wine. When wildfire smoke hit the valley in 2020, Hundred Acre declassified the vintage rather than bottle anything that fell short.

The gold ring is a promise. Every Hundred Acre bottle has a band of 24-karat gold fired into the glass at the rim. Dana calls it his promise ring to whoever opens the bottle: a promise that he did everything in his power to make it the best bottle of wine you'll have that day.

2022: The Vintage That Proved the Point

Early September 2022 brought one of the worst heat waves in modern Napa history. Temperatures stayed above 100 degrees for most of a week, and parts of the valley hit record highs around 115. Dana remembers her own thermometer reading 122. And she says for a week the nights never dropped below 80, when Napa normally cools off into the 50s after dark.

That nightly cool-down is the whole secret of great Napa Cabernet. In 2022 it disappeared.

When she asked Woodbridge how he got through it, he answered as though he'd seen it coming. "Jim and I have been preparing for the last 15 years for a vintage like '22."

They had. Every row of every vineyard has shade cloth, which crews put up in the morning and take down at night. And Woodbridge installed foggers, now two per vine, that Dana says cool each row by about ten degrees.

The 2022 Hundred Acre wines came out lighter in color than usual. Dana's explanation: the fruit got ripe and powerful so fast that it didn't need to sit on the skins as long. What it kept is a purity of fruit that has her more attached to 2022 than to any other vintage, precisely because it was so hard.

She told us a story that stuck with me. Years ago, when she worked for one of the country's big wine distributors, she traveled through Bordeaux with a veteran importer of French wine during the miserable 2013 vintage. The barrel samples were brutal, overworked and over-extracted. When she complained, he told her this is when you pick your chateaux. Anyone can make good wine in a great year. You find the winemakers worth following by tasting what they do when it's hard.

That's exactly why the 2022s are worth seeking out. We have both the 2022 Morgan's Way and the 2022 Ark.

What We Tasted

Dana pulled the corks about ten minutes before we sat down and poured four wines side by side. Two of them, the 2023 single-vineyard Cabernets, aren't being poured at the winery yet. She brought them in for us.

Summer Dreams The Sun Also Rises Chardonnay, Sonoma Coast

We started with a white, which surprised me, and it turned out to be the sleeper of the day. It borrows its name from Hemingway's novel. The fruit comes mostly from a small plot of the Heintz Ranch on the Sonoma Coast, one of California's great Chardonnay sites, with a little from a small estate vineyard of their own.

The winemaker is Ashley Holland, and her technique is fascinating. The wine goes through 100 percent malolactic fermentation, which on paper should make it buttery. It isn't. As Holland explained it to Dana, the trick is restraint. While malolactic is happening she doesn't stir, rack or touch the barrels at all, because disturbing the wine mid-fermentation is what produces that buttered-popcorn flavor. She needs malolactic for texture, since the coast is so cold, but she doesn't want the butter. Part of the wine also ages in acacia barrels, which add texture without oak flavor.

It has real, high acidity and a beautiful texture. Dana had the best description of the day. If Puligny-Montrachet and Chassagne-Montrachet had a baby, and it was born on the California coast, she said, this would be it: Chassagne's texture, Puligny's laser line, and unmistakably Californian fruit.

2022 Fortunate Son The Warrior, Napa Valley

The Warrior is the top wine of Fortunate Son, Woodbridge's other Napa label. It's a single-vineyard Cabernet from a site he won't name, because he doesn't name vineyards he doesn't own. The staff don't even know it. Woodbridge's view: does it matter? If you like it, drink it.

It's made exactly the way Hundred Acre is made: 100 percent new oak for fermentation and aging, and roughly three years in barrel. It's toasty and deep, and the finish goes on and on. It's 15.5 percent alcohol and you'd never guess.

See the 2022 Fortunate Son The Warrior

2023 Hundred Acre Morgan's Way, Napa Valley

Velvety and plush. Morgan's Way does exactly what Dana promised: it comes out of the glass to meet you. It's aromatic and open, with that hint of iron underneath. Like the others it sits in the mid-15s for alcohol, and you'd never know it. The oak, tannin and fruit are seamless. This is the one to open sooner.

See the 2023 Hundred Acre Morgan's Way

2023 Hundred Acre Ark Vineyard

My pick of the day. Next to Morgan's Way, the Ark has noticeably more acidity, more zip and bite, and a minerality I wrote down as wet stone. Darker fruit, tobacco leaf, still tight as a drum. Dana had tasted it a week or two earlier and said it was night and day since. This will be a profound wine with time.

See the 2023 Hundred Acre Ark

The 2023 vintage was long and cool in Napa, which is exactly what Cabernet wants. As much as Dana loves the 2022s, she admits the 2023s are on another level.

The thing that impressed me most: you can taste these out of order. Normally you line wines up from lightest to fullest, and if you go back to the lightest wine it falls flat. With these you can go from the Chardonnay to the Ark and back to Morgan's Way, and every one still holds its ground.

What about all that alcohol and aging? The usual argument against 15.5 percent Cabernet is that it won't last. Hundred Acre keeps proving otherwise. Dana says the 2000 Kayli Morgan, the very first vintage, is still showing well. A friend brought a 2005 Ark, the first Ark, to a dinner last year, and it's still one of her favorite wines ever. The acidity and the tannin are doing the work. My mouth was watering after the first sip of every one of them.

Fortunate Son: Hundred Acre Standards, Napa's Old Families

Fortunate Son started from a simple idea. Napa is full of family vineyards that have been farmed for two to five generations and have spent decades selling their grapes to other famous Cabernet houses. Woodbridge wanted to farm some of those sites the way he and Jim Barbour have learned to farm Hundred Acre over the past 26 years, and bottle them under his own name. Some of the vines are 80 years old or more.

The name started as a nod to the fortunate sons and daughters of the valley. Over time it came to mean something broader. In Dana's telling, Woodbridge believes we're all fortunate: to be here, and to be opening a bottle with people we care about.

• The Dreamer: 100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon. We have the 2022 Dreamer.
• The Diplomat: traditionally with some Merlot. Starting with 2022, it's predominantly Cabernet.
• The Warrior: the single-vineyard flagship, made since 2018. We have the 2022 and a few bottles of the 2021.

Every vintage of every Fortunate Son wine carries a different quote on the label. The 2021 Warrior quotes Sun Tzu's The Art of War. The 2022 quotes the karate master Mas Oyama, on warriors who live by their own code of honor.

The family runs through this label too. Fortunate Son is based at the David Fulton winery in St. Helena, founded in 1860 as the town's first winery. Woodbridge's son Cameron works in the cellar. In 2022 Woodbridge bought a historic Larkmead Lane vineyard in Calistoga, first planted in 1882, and renamed it True Romance. Romance is an anagram of Cameron, and True Romance is one of Cameron and Helen's favorite movies. The Madrigal property he bought in 2024 is now called Helen's Way.

Summer Dreams: Chasing Cold on the Sonoma Coast

When Woodbridge told his team he wanted to make Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on the far Sonoma Coast, they tried to talk him out of it. It's cold, the fruit struggles to ripen, and the vineyards are two to two and a half hours each way on narrow, winding, single-lane roads.

His answer: "If it was easy, everybody would do it."

The white wines are made by Ashley Holland, who came up under Bob Cabral at Three Sticks and makes her own label, Read Holland. Dana once asked her what keeps her at Summer Dreams. Her answer, as Dana relays it: when Woodbridge hired her, he asked what she needed to make great wine. Every winemaker has been asked that question. You list five things, and the owner tells you to pick the top one or two. Woodbridge listened, then told her to go do all of it.

So she built the winery near Healdsburg that Dana calls Willy Wonka's factory. It has the Champagne press Holland wanted. She picks the staves for every barrel she buys, and she got her acacia barrels too.

A word on vintages from the coast, where the story is the opposite of Napa. 2023 was so cold that many coastal growers barely ripened anything, and little wine was made. Dana thinks the 2025 whites now in barrel are the best they've made.

Why Hundred Acre Built a Kitchen Instead of a Tasting Bar

When the team finally convinced Woodbridge to host guests, he agreed on one condition: the food had to be as good as the wine.

He meant it. According to Dana, he hired a chef who came from Saison, the San Francisco restaurant that held three Michelin stars, and who helped open its seafood-focused sister, Angler. The chef brought his team. On a normal day six or seven chefs are working, and everything is made in house.

Every tasting comes with small bites from the kitchen, and there are lunches and dinners every so often. The kitchen is dry-aging wagyu and fish, and tanks are going in for live seafood. Dana rattled off recent dishes: spot prawns, Alaskan king crab, and a Wellington made with A5 Japanese wagyu, chanterelle duxelles and, lately, foie gras inside. And none of it is paired. It's just great food served next to great wine.

When I asked what that costs, Dana laughed: there's no P&L for it. Like everything else here, it's all or nothing. Whatever greatness requires, they do.

The room itself is pure Woodbridge. Nearly everything in it is one of a kind or designed by him, and it arrived piece by piece. That includes a collection of mounted animal heads. Woodbridge likes to walk guests around and explain how each animal was once rude to Jim Barbour, and what happened next.

One more detail I loved. When the Hundred Acre team goes out to dinner, they don't order their own wine. They order white Burgundy, Champagne and Bordeaux. You can't talk about your wine, Dana says, unless you know what's going on in the rest of the world.

Can You Visit Hundred Acre?

Generally, no. Neither The Ring, the cave winery under the Ark vineyard, nor Private Road, where we were hosted, is open to the public, and Hundred Acre doesn't run public tastings. The few guests who do get a seat are mostly mailing-list clients and trade.

If you want in, the first step is the waiting list for the mailing list at hundredacre.com. The sister labels, Fortunate Son and Summer Dreams, are easier to approach. Check their sites for current visit options.

For most people, the closest they'll ever get is the bottle. That's why we wrote this.

How to Buy Hundred Acre

Hundred Acre sells through its mailing list, top restaurants and a short list of retailers. The winery never discounts, so a current release priced far below the going rate deserves a second look.

A few buying notes from the visit:

• For drinking sooner: Morgan's Way. It's the most open and aromatic young.
• For the cellar: Ark. It's tight now and built to go for years.
• For the vintage story: 2022. Lighter, pure-fruited, and a winemaker's vintage.
• For the Hundred Acre style at a lower price: Fortunate Son, made the same way from family-owned Napa vineyards. The Dreamer is the place to start.
• Timing: the 2023 single-vineyard wines are shipping now. The 2023 Fortunate Son wines are expected in early 2027.

Quick Answers: Hundred Acre Winery

Is it Hundred Acre or 100 Acre?

The winery's name is Hundred Acre, written out. "100 Acre" is a common way people search for it, but it's the same winery in St. Helena, Napa Valley.

Where is Hundred Acre winery?

In Napa Valley, between St. Helena and Calistoga. Morgan's Way is off the Silverado Trail in St. Helena, and Ark is a hillside below Glass Mountain with The Ring, the cave winery, beneath it. Few and Far Between and Private Road are next to each other near Calistoga.

Who owns Hundred Acre?

Founder Jayson Woodbridge and his wife, Helen. Woodbridge, a former investment banker from Toronto, founded it in 1999. He has made the wines himself since 2002, and Jim Barbour has farmed the vineyards from the start.

Who is Jayson Woodbridge?

The founder and winemaker of Hundred Acre. A Toronto-born former investment banker, he moved his family to Napa in the late 1990s, bought his first hillside in 1999 and has made the wines himself since 2002. He also created Layer Cake, Cherry Pie and If You See Kay, which he sold in 2018.

What is the Hundred Acre Wine Group?

The Woodbridge family's wine company. Besides Hundred Acre, it makes Fortunate Son in Napa and Summer Dreams on the Sonoma Coast. Since 2022 it has added the True Romance vineyard on Larkmead Lane, the former Madrigal property (now Helen's Way) and the former Kelly Fleming estate (now Private Road).

Can you visit Hundred Acre winery?

Not as a member of the public. There's no public tasting room. Visits are by invitation, mainly for mailing-list clients and trade. You can join the mailing-list waiting list at hundredacre.com.

Is Hundred Acre a cult wine?

Yes. It's one of the Napa Cabernets usually called cult wines: tiny production, a mailing list with a waiting list, no public tasting room, and a run of perfect scores, including six 100-point wines from the 2021 vintage.

Why is Hundred Acre so expensive?

There's very little of it, and nothing is done halfway. The estate Cabernet comes from fewer than 30 planted acres. The vines are thinned to one cluster per shoot, the wine goes into all new oak, barrels that fall short are poured out rather than sold, and a weak year like 2020 is declassified entirely. The winery never discounts.

How much does Hundred Acre wine cost?

At Big Hammer in November 2026, the 2022 and 2023 Ark and Morgan's Way are about $750 a bottle, Fortunate Son The Warrior about $400, and Fortunate Son The Dreamer about $175. Prices move with each release, so check the wine's page for today's price.

What are the Hundred Acre vineyards?

There are three estate single-vineyard Cabernets. Morgan's Way (formerly Kayli Morgan) is a 9-acre clay site off the Silverado Trail in St. Helena. Ark is an amphitheater-shaped hillside below Glass Mountain in St. Helena. Few and Far Between is in Calistoga. A fourth site, Private Road, has released nothing yet.

What's the difference between Kayli Morgan and Morgan's Way?

Nothing but the name. Kayli Morgan was renamed Morgan's Way starting with the 2019 vintage, for Woodbridge's daughter, Morgan.

What's the difference between Ark and Morgan's Way?

Only the vineyard. Both are made the same way by the same team. Morgan's Way grows on clay strewn with obsidian off the Silverado Trail, and it's the aromatic, plush one, with a hint of iron. Ark grows on a steep hillside of red soils, obsidian and volcanic pebbles below Glass Mountain, and it's darker, tighter and more mineral.

What is Hundred Acre Wraith?

A blend of all three estate vineyards, meant to capture the whole vintage. Holy Quest, which debuted in 2021, is a selection of Wraith barrels made only in certain years.

What are the best recent Hundred Acre vintages?

2021 earned six perfect 100-point scores from Lisa Perrotti-Brown MW. 2022, a heat-wave year, is the vintage Dana loves for its purity of fruit. 2023, long and cool, is the one she says is on another level. There is no 2020: it was declassified after the wildfire smoke. The first vintage was 2000, and the first Ark was 2005.

When should you drink Hundred Acre, and how long does it age?

Morgan's Way is the most open young; Ark is tight and built for the cellar. Despite the alcohol, the wines age: the 2000 Kayli Morgan, the very first vintage, is still showing well, and the 2005 Ark is still one of Dana's favorite wines.

Where should a new collector start with Hundred Acre?

For the house style at a lower price, start with Fortunate Son The Dreamer. For Hundred Acre itself, Morgan's Way is the most approachable young, and Ark rewards patience.

Is Fortunate Son Hundred Acre's second label?

No. It's a separate label made the same way, with all new oak and the same standards, from family-owned Napa vineyards. Barrels that don't make the cut for Hundred Acre are destroyed, not sent to Fortunate Son.

Why is Hundred Acre so high in alcohol?

Woodbridge picks for flavor, not for a number, and prints the true alcohol on the label. Most vintages land around 15.5 percent. The wines are balanced by acidity and tannin and have aged well, back to the first vintage in 2000.

Who makes Summer Dreams wine?

Summer Dreams is the Woodbridges' Sonoma Coast label. It makes Chardonnay, Pinot Noir and Sauvignon Blanc from vineyards including the Heintz Ranch, and Ashley Holland makes the white wines.

Ready to taste the five stars? Start with the 2023 Ark or the 2023 Morgan's Way, or go back a year to the 2022s, the vintage that proved the point. And if you're hunting a specific bottle or back vintage, contact us for a quote. We source wine globally, with a 12-bottle minimum on special orders.