A Storied Winery Runs Toward Tech, Reaps the Rewards

While its lush cabernets adhere to classical traditions, Silver Oak Cellars is pushing winemaking into the 21st century by embracing breakthrough technology, sustainability and data insights. Here's a toast to the Napa Valley mainstay that's fomenting - and fermenting - a wine revolution.

- Jason Ankeny

 

What are we going to do? We’re going to rebuild the winery.”

Sometimes an ending is also a beginning.

Around 6:30 a.m. on Feb. 2, 2006, firetrucks from across Napa Valley raced to the Oakville, Calif., site of Silver Oak Cellars, one of the region’s oldest and most celebrated boutique wineries. Smoldering fireplace ashes discarded in a nearby dumpster had caught fire sometime before sunrise, and the flames soon engulfed Bonny’s Chai, the 7,000-square-foot erstwhile dairy barn that served as Silver Oak’s original winemaking facility in 1972, the year Ray Duncan and Justin Meyer began crafting the first vintage of their signature cabernet sauvignon.

No lives were lost in the blaze, but the historic Bonny’s Chai was destroyed. The fire also claimed about 70 barrels of Silver Oak’s 2004 Napa Valley Cabernet, valued at roughly $2 million, and caused heat and smoke damage to other buildings on the property.

“The old days of Silver Oak literally burned down,” president and CEO David Duncan, the youngest of Ray Duncan’s four sons, recalls almost a decade later. “I remember we were at my dad’s house that afternoon. The whole management team was sitting there, and it’s dead silence, except for the sniffles. Rickie [Piña, Silver Oak’s CFO] all of a sudden goes, ‘What are we going to do?’ I looked up, without missing a beat, and said, ‘We’re gonna rebuild the winery.’ Everyone relaxed and started laughing, and we opened wine. We knew we had a future, no matter what.”