A Storied Winery Runs Toward Tech, Reaps the Rewards
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.”
Silver Oak didn’t simply start over, however. It seized the opportunity to rethink both the art and business of winemaking, blending its time-tested oenological principles and processes with cutting-edge technologies, analytics-driven insights and sustainable philosophies -- in essence, bridging the gap between Napa Valley and Silicon Valley, its neighbor less than 100 miles to the south.
Seven years removed from the grand opening of the reconstructed Oakville facility, Silver Oak remains both an institution and an innovator. While consumer support for its supple, food-friendly cabernets has never wavered over time -- Silver Oak consistently places among the top 10 on magazine’s annual countdown of bestselling restaurant wines -- David Duncan says the company is currently producing the richest, most nuanced wines in its 43-year history. He
