Issue 8 · July 15, 2026

Somebody Has to Be Here

A one-bottle Malbec run at a Healdsburg winery, and the story a good winery knows how to tell.

I went to De La Montanya for one bottle. My daughter's partner likes Malbec, probably owing to his Ecuadorian roots, and on a hot Tuesday at the end of June I stopped in to pick one up. Jarod looked up from the only other table he was working and said my name before I had said a word.

Friends brought us here years ago, back when the winery ran a joint venture with Finale Wines and a keyboard player from Journey. That is a story worth telling another time. It started as afternoons in the garden behind the tasting room, the one with the bocce court and the apple trees, and somewhere along the way it turned into a membership. Neither my daughter nor her partner drinks much wine, and this is the place I send people like that, easy for a beginner and still good for someone who has been at it for years. A wine of the people, and it never makes anyone feel small for where they are starting from.

Most of Dry Creek is dark Monday through Wednesday. De La Montanya was open, the way it usually is. It was noon, the sun high and hard, the umbrellas up for shade, and the bees loud in the flowers, busy at the only job they have. The heat and the day of the week had thinned the garden to one other party. A one-bottle sale on a Tuesday like that is easy to keep quick, and Jarod did the opposite. He walked me into the cool of the tasting room and started pulling corks on bottles that were still sealed, which on a dead afternoon is a calculated loss, since a bottle nobody finishes is money poured down the sink. He opened them anyway, for the one guaranteed guest in the room.

One of them was the Pinot Meunier. De La Montanya makes dozens of small lots, which is how a grape like Meunier ends up with a bottle of its own when it almost never does anywhere else. I swirled it, put my nose in, took the smallest sip and let it sit. The florals came up first and then the fruit, one behind the other, and I stood there longer than a pickup calls for. I was driving, so I did not swallow much. The real glass would wait for home. The fifteen minutes I had planned on turned into an hour.

I did not need any of it. I have more drink-now bottles at home than I will get through before they turn. But I had been known by name, on a day I turned up unannounced for a single bottle. More than a hundred wineries fill the three valleys around Healdsburg, each with its own garden and its own person behind the bar, and most of them will hand you a card with the same words on it, dark cherry and a note of oak.

Jarod lives on the right side of that. He told me they keep the tasting room open as much as they can. "Somebody has to be here anyway," he said. "It's a working winery." Every person who walks in is a member they have not met yet, and he would rather people come when it suits them than have to check which days the winery is open. I came in for one bottle of Malbec. I left with a case.

I took the long way home, mostly to get out ahead of the holiday traffic starting to build on the interstate. It was a tiring drive. Highway 128 narrows to something close to one lane and climbs through switchback after switchback, and it runs through country that burned not long ago. The hills still carry the scars, and the last time I drove this stretch the fires were still up there, close enough to see.

Every winery on a road like this carries a story it did not choose, the year the smoke got into the fruit, or the one they were sure would be their last. The switchbacks are a fair picture of the work, the good years and the bad, and the fires that do not care which. Some places will tell you the whole of it if you ask. Others hand you the same card and hope you will not.

It is the third of July now, a few evenings on, and Sparks is still holding the day's heat into the evening. The firepit is lit, the sky above the fence has gone pink at the edges, and I have a glass of the De La Montanya 5, their Bordeaux blend, the better part of two years in oak. It came from a garden across the state line, from people who know my name and know their own story. That is what I taste, out here by the fire.

The Story Behind the Pour

Pinot Meunier — De La Montanya, 2024

A single-varietal Pinot Meunier from Christine's Vineyard on the Sonoma Coast, lightly pressed and rested in French oak. Floral on the nose, forward with fruit, soft and supple across the palate. Boysenberry and black cherry, a little spicy oak and vanilla, and tannins that stay gentle. Soft and smooth, and easy to see why the grape usually disappears into a blend.