Margaret Rand enjoys a six-vintage retrospective of Joseph Phelps Insignia.
Typical, isn’t it? Big multinational buys family company because, presumably, it likes what it’s doing—but then it changes everything. It happens everywhere. We all do it ourselves, with houses: we buy something and remake it in our own image and likeness.
Where it’s happening this time is at Joseph Phelps. Joseph died in 2015, and the next generation took over; the generation after that was getting into it. Then, in 2022, LVMH bought it, for an undisclosed sum—and now, says estate director David Pearson, “We’re in the process of changing almost everything.”
Pearson’s background is UC Davis for winemaking studies, then a master’s in marketing. His first job was for Baron Philippe de Rothschild SA, marketing Mouton Cadet in the US. You learn a lot from a tough job, he says.
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Then he was at Opus One for more than 16 years and studied the stories of companies that have gone through several generations. “Some continue to thrive,” he says, “and others not. What’s the difference? Yin and yang. Those that sustainably go through transitional change preserve their core. Maybe that’s yin or maybe yang, I don’t know. But they preserve it at all costs. Yang is to stimulate change. You have to create a company that does both at the same time.”
Phelps the company is 50 years old now. What is that core that won’t be changed? One might feel that the core is whatever the buyer wants it to be, and Pearson says that Joseph Phelps was very entrepreneurial and wanted excellence, which is perfectly true. “He was the first to say he was going to take the best grapes and blend them under a proprietary name. Opus One followed the same model in 1979.
“When LVMH spoke with me in May 2023,” he says, “I asked them what their intentions were for this iconic winery. I could imagine three strategies. If a company buys another company for its brand equity, it can leverage that to make an inexpensive version and make a lot of money; we’ve seen that in Napa in the past. They exhaust the brand. The second way is to increase profitability and just manage what is. They said to me, ‘We’re very ambitious. We want to bring the resources necessary to make Insignia recognized as the first wine in Napa. We want it demanded all around the world.’
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“If the goal is to be the finest possible and our actions don’t support that, then it’s all blah blah blah. There’s a lot of blah blah blah in the wine business. Heublein used to say, ‘Don’t believe your own bullshit.’ You have to walk the talk.”
LVMH, he says, wants to be recognized as a maker of fine wine—a curious ambition, one might think, for a company that already owns, and is recognized as owning, Cheval Blanc, Yquem, Clos des Lambrays, and Colgin Cellars, as well as Veuve Clicquot, Dom Pérignon, and Ruinart. But Pearson says, “It’s not a player as Moët-Hennessy.” But it is certainly a player as an owner of luxury brands.
It’s hard to say exactly when Insignia became a fully paid-up luxury brand, but these days it sells for $300–350 a bottle, so it’s certainly there. Like most wines that were already established when the idea of wine as a luxury item took hold, it just found its way there, helped no doubt by Wine Spectator naming the 2002 vintage its number-one wine of the year. Pearson recalls a tasting he did for the C-suite (CEO, CIO, any others you can think of) of Bank of America. “I said to them that the greatest luxury is time. They all nodded.” One can imagine.
Does Pearson expect the price to rise? “Price is supply and demand. My hope is to increase appreciation and demand globally, and price will follow. I have no price objective.”
Insignia has come off the Bordeaux Place. It was put there with the 2016 vintage and stayed there for a few years. One of Pearson’s first tasks at Phelps was to ring négociants and buy back their inventory. “We need to build relationships, and our network is better than the Place at that.”
Expect Insignia to reach ever dizzier heights of demand and price, then. But what will they actually do in the vineyards and winery?
Enabling nature
Vineyards come first in the plan. Pearson is a convert to permaculture, having seen its effects on soil health at estates in France. “It was a kind of epiphany,” he says. “We turn our cover crop in spring and leave the earth bare for the rest of the year.” Cheval Blanc has been doing things differently for ten years or more, with trees in the middle of the vines, “and we will do the same thing. It’s very profound; it changes our relationship with nature. The idea that we can control nature—we take the green stuff out, plant with a limited genetic range, then feed with fertilizer, and take out the weeds and kill bugs in a constant battle against nature. And globally we’re losing that battle.
“Now we’re going to bring biodiversity back and create an ecosystem that turns; we get involved at the right time and enable nature to work properly.”
You might argue that thinking that we can intervene in seemingly the right way to help nature might still end up being misguided in another way. But if we want wine… Pearson quotes key books—Entangled Life (Mervyn Sheldrake), The One-Straw Revolution (Masanobu Fukuoka), and Braiding Sweetgrass (Robin Wall Kimmerer)—and says that LVMH is committed to that approach. It has a soil forum every couple of years to discuss such matters.
The trees must be the right ones: Oaks and olives compete with vines, he says, whereas maples and fruit trees—apricots or cherries—co-evolve. It will involve replanting all the vineyards, starting with Home Ranch, and learning as they go. “It will become the way of farming.”
There will be changes in the cellar, too, but those are still up in the air. There’s a new winemaker, Ryan Knoth, with whom Pearson seems delighted and who is definitely in the finesse-and-elegance school. So, will there be amphorae/granite/concrete/glass globes/you name it? “You can change a cellar every five years if you want to follow fashion,” Pearson says. “A cellar is like a kitchen for a chef. You learn to work in the kitchen you have. Experimenting is interesting, but it’s not the first thing we have to do.”
Tasting
2021 Joseph Phelps Insignia
The texture is outstanding: fluid and fine, and backed by rich, ripe blackcurrant fruit, as black as black can be; bitter-black, in a good way. The tannins give an edge, and there’s lovely tension between the ease of the fruit and that fine, firm edge of tannin. | 97
2019 Joseph Phelps Insignia
Supple, with less edge and very fine texture, like the thinnest, airiest linen, almost billowing. There’s tension, too, and the length is extraordinary, both wandering and focused at the same time. Black-fruited and aromatic. It feels light on the palate, but it’s penetrating, too. | 98
2016 Joseph Pehlps Insignia
Supple, with blackcurrant fruit turning into black cherry—and I hope not just because David Pearson has been telling me about the black-cherry tree in his garden. Grippy, with lovely depth, firm structure, and good acidity. More angular. | 96
2014 Joseph Phelps Insignia
A beautiful nose of black cherry and sweeter fruit, soft and supple. Is it very slightly short of concentration in the middle? Very fluid, detailed, and fresh, with enormous elegance and finesse. A wine that doesn’t need to try. | 96
2008 Joseph Phelps Insignia
Layered nose, black cherry and flowers, with a note of leather creeping in. Wonderful texture again, so fine-grained and supple, like sun through silk. Blackberry fruit, wild and focused. | 97
2002 Joseph Phelps Insignia
Much more punch than more recent vintages; made in a different mold. Even though Phelps never went in for body-building fruit-bombs, fashions were different then. Blackcurrant fruit, more forward in style, plenty of energy still, and still that lovely silkiness. | 95
