Bernard Portet has been involved in the Stags Leap District since before it was even known as the Stags Leaps District. He co-founded Clos du Val on the Silverado Trail south of Yountville in 1972, the same year that Carl Doumani opened his Stags’ Leap Winery and Warren Winiarski started Stag’s Leap Wine Cellars. Of the three, Portet is perhaps best known for making some of the most long-lived wines in the Napa Valley.

That’s most likely due to the fact that Portet was raised in Bordeaux where he spent many years working with his dad, a régisseur (technical director) at Château Lafite. In other words, Portet believed he could make wines in the Napa Valley in the same way as they’d been doing in France.

At a 25-year retrospective tasting of Clos du Val’s wines in 1999, Alan Goldfarb, AppelllationAmerica's Napa Valley Regional Correspondent, found some of Portet’s earlier wines from the late 1970s and early ‘80s still had vitality. At the same time, he found some of the wines from the ‘90s still hadn’t reached their maturity.

But that philosophy may have changed, although Portet is quick to correct the inquisitor, saying that, at Clos du Val, “we’ve evolved.” This “evolution”, under the direction of winemaker and vineyard manager John Clews, seems to be in response to pressure from the marketplace. Whatever the reason, beginning with the 2001 vintage, we’ve begun to see Portet’s wines become more approachable earlier in their development.

Portet seems reticent about this change, but admitted to Alan Goldfarb that, yes, “at first, I had to acknowledge that our wines were not showy enough. …”

Portet is now the vice chair of Clos du Val, and thus spends about 40 percent of his time these days overseeing his company’s Australian and French holdings. Recently, in a wide-ranging telephone and e-mail conversation, Portet spoke about the evolving culture at Clos du Val.