For two nights in August, a little piece of Napa came to Carmel—and the Wine Scholars got a front-row seat.
There are wine dinners, and then there are the nights you find yourself talking about weeks later.
On August 22 and 24, we were lucky enough to host two couples’ dinners with Palmaz Vineyards here in Carmel. Same incredible lineup of wines. Two beautiful homes. Two completely different styles of dinner. And one recurring theme: by the end of each night, nobody was quite ready to leave.
Palmaz brought the wine. They brought the story. And, perhaps most importantly, they brought the steak.
That last part deserves emphasis.
Because as good as the wine was—and it was very good—the beef somehow managed to compete for the spotlight.
Night One: The Faracs Go All In
Our first dinner on August 22 was at the Faracs’ recently remodeled home, which felt as though it had been designed specifically for a night like this.
Beautiful space. Great friends. Wine everywhere. And a menu that became progressively more ridiculous—in the best possible way—as the evening went on.
This wasn't simply steak and Cabernet.
We started with caviar, because apparently we had collectively decided there was no reason to ease into the evening.
Then came a wonderful gazpacho, with the vegetables fire-roasted a day or two beforehand to give it an incredible smoky depth. From there, we moved to bone marrow toast, using marrow supplied by Palmaz.
And then came the steak.
Palmaz's connection to beef actually runs much deeper than a clever Cabernet pairing. The family also operates Genesee Valley Ranch in California's Sierra Nevada, where they raise purebred Black Wagyu cattle entirely on grass pasture. Their Brasas food-and-wine program was essentially created around the idea that if you're going to make extraordinary Cabernet, you might as well produce beef worthy of drinking alongside it.
Mission accomplished.
The steak was one of those dishes where conversation briefly slows down after everyone takes the first bite.
It was served with vegetables, followed eventually by a cheese course and chocolate-covered dates—although by that point, "eventually" is doing some work. We had been eating and drinking for hours.
And somehow we finished everything.
All the food.
All the wine.
A strong Wine Scholars performance.
The Lineup
Across both evenings, Shawn from Palmaz took us through five wines that showed just how much more there is to Palmaz than simply "great Napa Cabernet."
We began with the Louise Riesling, followed by the Amalia Chardonnay, before moving into the reds: the 2021 Palmaz Estate Cabernet Sauvignon, 2021 Gaston Cabernet Sauvignon, and finally the 2016 Palmaz Estate Cabernet Sauvignon.
It was a fantastic progression.
The Riesling gave us something bright and refreshing to start with, while the Amalia Chardonnay brought more weight and richness before Cabernet took over the table. Palmaz describes Louise as a limited-production Riesling fermented nearly dry without barrel aging, while Amalia Chardonnay is barrel fermented and deliberately made as a fuller-bodied counterpart to the family's Cabernet-focused portfolio.
Then we reached the 2021 Estate Cabernet.
That wine is predominantly Cabernet Sauvignon, with small amounts of Cabernet Franc and Petit Verdot, and Palmaz describes the vintage with dark currant, orange peel, clove, cinnamon, tobacco and dark cherry. It has plenty of structure, but there is an elegance underneath it that made it dangerously easy to keep revisiting.
And then there was Gaston.
The 2021 Gaston is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, aged 19 months in 100% new French oak and made in a relatively tiny production of just 1,079 cases. It is deeper, richer and more commanding—the kind of bottle that makes everyone at the table lean forward a little when it gets poured.
Finally, we jumped five years backward to the 2016 Estate Cabernet, and that may have been one of the most educational parts of the tasting. The extra bottle age showed what happens when Palmaz Cabernet has time to settle into itself. The winery's own notes talk about toasted currant, vanilla, caramel and baked boysenberry wrapped in elegant tannins.
Five wines. One table.
Repeated two nights later.
Not a bad weekend.
And Then Shawn Told Us What Was Under the Mountain
As memorable as the food and wine were, one of the standout parts of both evenings was having Shawn walk us through the story of Palmaz itself.
Because once you understand how this winery was built, the wines become even more interesting.
The story begins long before the Palmaz name appeared on a bottle.
In the late 1800s, Henry Hagen established Cedar Knoll Vineyard and Winery on the property at the base of Mount George. Hagen became one of Napa's early wine pioneers, and his wines were reportedly served in San Francisco society; his brandy even earned a silver medal at the 1889 World's Fair in Paris. After Hagen's death and eventually Prohibition, winemaking on the estate disappeared for decades.
One small historical clarification worth making: Cedar Knoll was not technically Napa's first winery—Charles Krug is generally credited with establishing Napa Valley's first commercial winery in 1861. But Cedar Knoll, dating to the late 19th century, absolutely belongs to Napa's formative winemaking era.
Nearly a century later, Dr. Julio Palmaz and his wife, Amalia, discovered the property while searching Napa for a place to pursue their own winemaking dream.
Julio Palmaz wasn't exactly coming from a traditional agricultural background. He was the physician and inventor famous for developing the balloon-expandable coronary stent. His interest in wine had developed years earlier while at UC Davis, when he and Amalia spent weekends exploring Napa Valley. After the family acquired the old Cedar Knoll property in the late 1990s, they began bringing the land back to life.
During restoration of the estate, they even uncovered a hidden historic wine cellar and tasting room beneath the house—a remarkable physical connection between the winery they were creating and the one that had existed there generations earlier.
And then, in very Palmaz fashion, they decided that simply restoring an old winery wasn't ambitious enough.
They built one inside a mountain.
The Palmaz Cave
This was the part of Shawn's presentation that had everyone paying attention.
Buried inside Mount George is an underground winery spanning more than 100,000 square feet and roughly 21 stories vertically. At its heart is a huge fermentation dome containing 24 fermentation tanks, allowing individual vineyard lots to be handled separately.
But the size isn't really the point.
Gravity is.
Plenty of wineries describe themselves as gravity-flow wineries. Palmaz took the concept much further.
The vertical distance inside the mountain allows wine to move through much of the production process—from fermentation through aging, blending, filtration and ultimately bottling—without relying on pumps. Even the pressure needed for bottling can be created by the difference in elevation within the winery. The idea is to move the wine as gently as possible and minimize unnecessary agitation.
It is simultaneously very old-fashioned and incredibly futuristic.
Gravity does the work.
Computers monitor everything.
Wine remains the point.
And hearing Shawn explain all of this while we were sitting around a dinner table in Carmel, glasses of Palmaz Cabernet in front of us, somehow made the winery feel much closer than Napa.
Night Two: The Davissons' Turn
Two nights later, on August 24, we did the whole thing again.
Different house. Different format. Same dangerous quantity of good wine.
This time we gathered at the Davissons' recently built home, another space seemingly made for entertaining.
The first dinner had been carefully choreographed course by course.
The Davissons' night was much more potluck-meets-Palmaz.
And it worked perfectly.
Instead of waiting for individual courses, we filled our plates with steak and sides, poured wine, found seats, went back for more, compared glasses and generally settled into that wonderful kind of dinner where the schedule disappears.
Shawn again took us through Palmaz—the family, the old Cedar Knoll estate, the underground winery, the gravity system—and we tasted through the same lineup.
Except something changes when you taste a wine for the second time.
You start recognizing it.
There was the Riesling again.
There was the Chardonnay.
There was the 2021 Estate Cabernet.
Then Gaston.
Then the 2016.
Suddenly we weren't simply drinking Palmaz anymore. We were comparing vintages, talking about structure and age, noticing differences, asking questions and going back to wines we had tasted two nights before.
Which is exactly what Wine Scholars is supposed to be.
This Is Why We Do It
Looking back, what made these two nights so memorable wasn't one particular bottle.
It wasn't even the steak.
Okay—the steak helped. A lot.
But it was the combination of everything.
Two gorgeous homes.
Two incredibly generous hosts.
Friends gathered around a table.
A winery willing to share not only its wines but its history.
A story that started with Henry Hagen making wine on Mount George in the 1800s, disappeared during Prohibition, was rediscovered by the Palmaz family a century later, and eventually resulted in an 21-story winery being carved into a mountain.
And somehow, for two nights, that entire story landed in Carmel.
That is pretty tough to recreate.
A huge thank you to the Faracs and the Davissons for opening their homes, to Shawn and Palmaz Vineyards for bringing the wine, knowledge and some absolutely outrageous beef, and to everyone who cooked, contributed and made the two nights what they were.
Cheers!🍷