From the Cellar: Notes from the Master Cooper Trip

April 2026, Michael Baldacci

The Trip

For the fourth time in eight years, I joined the Master Cooper trip, a small group of winemakers who are hand selected and hosted by French cooper Quinn Roberts and his cooperage Tonnellerie Ô. This year, we were in France April 11 to 17. The structure of the trip is always the same, and that consistency is part of what makes it valuable. We go to Burgundy and Chablis, and we also go to the forest. We visit the family-owned stave mill in Méry-ès-Bois. All the while, we enjoy meals together at expanside tables with the Gauthier family. One of my personal goals is to ask better questions than I asked the year before, building my knowledge and learning as much as I can. Every year I come home with a deeper understanding of where my wine barrels come from, and every year I am more convinced that this is one of the most important relationships in our winemaking program.

Tonnellerie Ô supplies roughly half of the barrels in the Baldacci cellar. I have worked with Quinn for eight vintage now, and I can tell you that he is exceptional not just because of his generational cooperage knowledge, but also because of his palate. Quinn tastes wine like a winemaker. He understands what a barrel is supposed to do for a wine, not just how to build one. When you are entrusting half of your barrel inventory to a single cooper, that level of curiosity and competence on the other end of the relationship matters more than I can say.

The other winemakers on the trip this year came from Sonoma, Oregon, and Napa. We were focused on Chardonnay and Pinot Noir on the Burgundian leg, and tasting alongside with that peer group brings its own education. Every glass gets six or seven sets of palates on it. Conversations move fast and stay technical. You learn things at dinner that you won’t learn anywhere else.

A Morning at Domaine Faiveley

In Burgundy, our first major stop was Domaine Faiveley, where we were hosted by Jérôme—the winemaker there for over twenty years. Jérôme is one of the most technically sound winemakers I have ever spent time with, and he is the kind of person who answers a question by giving you the answer, the reason behind it, and the variable that would change it.

We tasted 2025 vintage wines directly out of the barrel, working through a mix of premier cru and grand cru. Standing in the cellar at Faiveley, pulling samples of grand cru Burgundy out of the barrel, tasting wines in their absolute youth from some of the most acclaimed vineyard sites on earth, is an experience I will never forget. The wines were nervy and primary and honest, the way young Pinot Noir tastes before barrel aging rounds out the palate. I could feel the architecture of each site coming through.

The other thing that struck me, and that can often be misunderstood about a producer like Faiveley, is the scale. By case volume, Faiveley is large. But that volume is the sum of many small lots, from many vineyards, made in small fermenters, treated parcel by parcel. Walking through their cellar, what you see is a small winery’s logic operating at a larger total footprint. Every lot is its own decision and every barrel matters. The size is a function of how many vineyards they farm, not of how the wine is made—that is something I think about for our own program, as we farm across multiple AVAs in Napa.

We also visited Louis Jadot in Beaune. We tasted through Beaune wines and the experience was wildly different than Faiveley; it felt more procedural than alive. But in contrast, Jadot was instructive in its own way. It’s important to experience that not every famous name is doing the same thing or the same caliber of work, and tasting back-to-back is the fastest way to understand the difference.

Chablis, Domaine Laroche with Romain at Les Clos

From the Côte d’Or we went north to Chablis to visit Domaine Laroche. Romain, their winemaker, walked us to his Les Clos vineyard. Les Clos is one of the seven Grand Crus of Chablis, and standing in it gives you a remarkable vantage point of the appellation. From up there you can see the slope angles, the soil exposures, the village below, and how the Premier Cru and Grand Cru sites relate to each other geographically.

The whole region clicks into focus when you are standing in it. Chablis is small, and the differences between sites are subtle on paper but very obvious in person: aspect, slope, soil depth, drainage, the way the cold settles or moves through the land. A glass of Chablis makes more sense when you have seen the dirt the vines are planted in, and when you have felt the wind that blows across the fruit while ripening. That is true everywhere in wine, but it is especially true in Burgundy, where the differences between a Petit Chablis, a Premier Cru, and a Grand Cru are incredibly precise.

We tasted from the bottle, working through different vintages and crus. The young wines were what I expected and also better. The Premier Crus had an angularity to them, a tension that felt almost architectural. The Grand Crus were rounder, deeper, more complete, with a complexity that you could tell would increase with time. Tasting them side by side at the same age, you could feel the difference in scale of the sites in the wines themselves. That is what Grand Cru is supposed to mean, and at Laroche it certainly translates in the glass.

Tasting Chardonnay in Chablis with a group of California and Oregon winemakers focused on Chardonnay was one of the defining moments of the trip. We were quiet for a lot of it. It’s easy to be quiet and contemplative when the wine is doing all the talking.

The Forest at St-Palais

After Burgundy and Chablis, we drove west into the heart of central France for the part of the trip that has most changed my thinking over my past four visits. The St-Palais Forest sits in the Cher department, a region in central France that is oak country.

The forests here are managed by the ONF, the Office National des Forêts, under a framework that has governed French state forestry since the seventeenth century. Colbert, finance minister to Louis XIV, planted oaks in the 1660s specifically so that the French navy would have ship masts two hundred years in the future. Some of those original plantings are still standing. Some, like the trees we were harvesting this April, were planted in the Napoleonic era. When one of the foresters mentioned, almost in passing, that the trees we were cutting had likely been planted under Napoleon, I realized we were harvesting a decision someone made before the United States had finished its westward expansion. The history here is mind-boggling.

One thing that struck me is that this French oak forest was not a wild place in the way that a California redwood grove is wild. It is a multi-generational agricultural project. The ONF manages a rotation of roughly two hundred years from planting to final harvest, and that rotation is not passive. Every eight to ten years, foresters go through and thin the trees. They remove the weaker, the crooked, the ones whose canopies are competing badly with their neighbors. They are sculpting the forest slowly, over the working lives of ten or twelve generations of forester. The trees they leave standing grow taller and straighter, and develop the slow, dense, even grain that coopers need for wine barrels. The trees they remove are not waste. They become firewood, furniture, lower grade lumber, and fuel for the local economy. But the forest is being shaped, decade by decade, toward an ideal that none of the people doing the shaping will ever see fully realized.

For a winemaker, that timeline is staggering. I make wine over a year. I age it from nineteen to twenty-four months. The barrel I age it in represents two centuries of someone else’s discipline. The forester who marked my tree as a sapling worth keeping has been dead for a hundred years before I was born. The forester who will be alive, when the trees being planted at St-Palais this spring are harvested, has not yet been born and won’t be for several generations. It’s a humbling reminder that every bottle is not just a product of craft, but a quiet inheritance of time, stewardship, and faith in futures we will never see—and each barrel honors the legacy of these forester families.

What hit me this year, walking through forests at different stages of that rotation, was the foresight of the whole system. We saw young plantings, slender trees packed close, competing for light. We saw middle-aged stands where the thinning was active and visible. And then we saw the mature forest where we were cutting, towering and open, the canopy a hundred feet up, the trunks running clean and straight for fifty or sixty feet before the first branch. To understand French oak as a winemaker, you have to understand that it is the product of two centuries of human attention. The oak we use is not simply found; it is grown and attentively cared for, generation after generation.

 The Trees I Chose

The most extraordinary thing about this year’s trip, something I had never done before even on my three previous visits, was that I personally selected trees that will become my barrels. Not staves from a yard or lot numbers on an order form—Trees that I could touch.

Those trees were felled while I were there. They will be split, sorted, and aged for three years at the Gauthier mill, and the resulting barrels will be assembled in 2029, in time for that year’s harvest. The grapes nor wine I will put into them exist yet. There is something about that timeline that reorients me as a winemaker. Most of what I do is operate on annual cycles: bud break to harvest, harvest to bottle. But the barrel program operates on a scale that asks you to think much further out, and to trust the people on the other end of the chain to do their work for years before you ever see it.

At the Stave Mill

The Gauthier stave mill is a few minutes from the forest, in Méry-ès-Bois. The process they use to split the logs is proprietary. When a massive log comes in, a section of trunk—and what comes out after the splitting and the sorting—is a startlingly small number of usable staves. The yield is humbling. French oak barrels require not just the right age and the right grain, but staves that have been split, not sawn, along the grain, with no knots, no irregularities, and no curving figure. The Gauthiers’ team works through each log with a level of technical eyesight that I have never seen anywhere else in the wood trade. A stave that looks fine to me will get pulled and set aside because of a flaw I cannot see until they point it out. The staves that survive the sorting are works of art before they ever become a barrel. The meticulous craftsmanship at this level is incredible to watch.

After sorting, the staves are stacked outside and aged in the open air for three years in the rain, sun, wind, and frost. The aging in the yard is what takes the harshness out of the wood, leaching the green, aggressive tannins and letting the wood cure. It takes three years of weather to prepare a stave to hold wine. There is no shortcut.

At the end of those three years, the Gauthiers ship me single staves, not assembled barrels. With those staves, our barrels are built in Benicia, at Tonnelerie Ô’s California cooperage, about an hour from Baldacci Family Vineyard.

The barrel never has to travel far to meet its wine. This short shipping difference is significant. A container holds far more flat staves than assembled barrels. A barrel is mostly empty space; you pay to ship that air across an ocean. Sending staves and assembling locally reduces the carbon footprint of every barrel. It also means the final assembly, including toasting, head fitting, and construction, happens close enough that I can be there to watch, ask questions, and adjust as needed. From forest to barrel, I am involved in the entire process.

The Gauthier Family

The Gauthier Family is at the heart of why this trip matters so much to me. Camille Gauthier is the patriarch. He started this business by going out into the forests himself, splitting logs, and building staves with his hands. I met him for the first time on this trip, after years of working with his daughter and grandchildren. To shake his hand and look him in the eye in the place he built was something I will always carry with me.

Nathalie is the next generation, and after four trips to France, she has become someone I genuinely consider a friend. Her daughter Adeline and son Vincent are part of the operation now too, a third generation. Each year the Gauthiers host us for family-style meals at a long table, with their wine and their food and their stories, and the breaking of bread feels just like it does at home with my family. I try not to take it for granted. We are guests in their family business, and they treat us as if we belong there, as if we are family, too.

In that way, Baldacci Family Vineyards and the Gauthiers are kindred spirits. Baldacci is a family business, too. We are in our second generation now, with my nephew Charlie growing up around the winery and the chance, someday, that he could carry it into a third. The Gauthiers are walking the same road we are walking, just in oak rather than wine, and a generation ahead of us. Watching how Camille passed the work to Nathalie, and how Nathalie is bringing Adeline and Vincent alongside her, has given me a lot to consider as we build for the next generation of our own family.

Why I Keep Going Back

People sometimes ask me, especially when I’m three or four days into being away from my family and the cellar, why I bother making this trip every year or two. The barrels would arrive whether I go to France or not. Quinn would still call me with update and nothing about the barrels would technically change.

I go because I want to know every step of the process behind every wine we make. I want to know the soil our vines are rooted in, the people who farm them, the people who pick them, the people who built the tank we ferment in, the people who grew the trees for the barrels that we age the wine in, and the people who transform those trees into the barrels that will hold our Cabernet for nineteen months before it goes in a bottle. I want to know all of it. I want our customers to know that I know all of it. And I want, when I open a bottle of Baldacci with you at a winemaker dinner or a club event or in our cave, to be able to tell you the name of the family in central France whose grandfather started splitting the wood that became this barrel.

This is how I make wine that I am proud of.

The tree I chose this April will spend three years in the open air at Méry-ès-Bois. It will arrive in Benicia as staves in 2029. It will become barrels a few weeks after that, and those barrels will hold a wine that does not yet exist, made from grapes from vines that have not yet flowered, in a vintage I cannot predict. But I have already met the tree. And I have already met the family who will turn it into something I can put my name on. That is worth flying to France for. Every time.

Next month: a closer look at our 2024 Brenda’s Single Barrel Cabernet Sauvignon, which we just finalized as our Auction Napa Valley lot.

Stags Leap Sourdough Starter:

An Easy, Foolproof Method for Creating Your Own Sourdough Starter

Recipe & Photos by Haley Warnock

The sourdough craze may have peaked a few years ago, but the joy of creating your own starter never goes out of style. If the process has ever felt intimidating or overly technical, enter our Stags Leap Sourdough Starter. This simple and quick method was inspired by our estate vineyards, using the very same Cabernet Sauvignon grapes that make our Black Label!

Grapes are naturally coated with wild yeasts, making them the perfect catalyst for a robust starter packed with local character. This method creates a quick, lively, naturally fermented starter that you can keep, feed, and bake with for years to come.

What Makes This Starter Special?

• Wild yeast from our vineyard provides the fermentation power, creating a fast fermentation and complex aromas.
• Whole wheat flour and filtered water give the yeast an ideal environment to thrive.
• Minimal equipment, lots of flavor—the process is rustic, approachable, and deeply connected to the land.

Where to Get Grapes for Your Starter

We used grapes picked during harvest at our Stags Leap District vineyard, but we know our readers live all across the country, and the timing isn’t always perfect. Fortunately, you have options!

Here are some ways to source grapes year-round or during late summer/early fall:

1. Local Farmers’ Markets (Seasonal)

From August through October, most regions offer organic or sustainably grown table grapes. Look for varieties with a “bloom” (that dusty appearance on the skin), which is actually a coating of wild yeast.

2. Natural Grocery Stores

Stores like Whole Foods, Sprouts, and local co-ops often carry organic, unwashed grapes, even outside peak season. Avoid pre-washed or “ready-to-eat” grapes, as the natural yeast will be reduced.

3. CSA Boxes or Farm Shares

If you subscribe to a weekly produce box, check if they offer grapes during their harvest window. Many CSAs partner with small farms that grow heirloom or minimally treated fruit.

5. Substitute Fresh Organic Berries (Off-Season)

If fresh grapes aren’t available, you can substitute organic berries, such as blueberries or raspberries. Both carry natural yeasts and can successfully kick-start your fermentation.

If you find yourself in Napa during the next harvest season, you’re welcome to ask our team about sourcing a small cluster right from the Baldacci estate!

How to Make Stags Leap Sourdough Starter

Ingredients

• 1 large bunch of organic grapes(We used Cabernet Sauvignon grapes from our Stags Leap District vineyard.)
• 1.5 cups organic whole wheat flour
• 2 cups filtered water

Instructions

1. Combine flour and water.
   In a medium bowl, whisk together the flour and water until smooth and free of lumps.

2. Add the grapes.
   Submerge the entire bunch of grapes into the mixture. The natural yeast on the skins will kick-start the fermentation process.

3. Cover and ferment.
   Cover the bowl loosely with plastic wrap and leave it in a warm room (70–78°F is ideal) for 4–7 days.

4. Feed daily.
   Each day, add a few spoonfuls of flour and water to maintain a thin pancake-batter consistency. Stir gently to incorporate.

5. Watch for activity.
   The starter is considered “active” when it becomes bubbly and airy shortly after feeding; this can happen as early as day 3.

6. Strain and store.
   Once active, strain out and discard the grapes. Transfer the starter to a clean glass jar.

7. Use and maintain.
   Feed your starter as needed and use it in your favorite sourdough recipes. With regular care, it can live indefinitely!