Pam Starr is calling from Napa Wine Company, the Oakville custom-crush facility where she is working on Adastra’s 2006 Merlot. The tiny Carneros brand is currently in her consulting portfolio. That’s when she’s not making wine for Crocker & Starr Wines, the St. Helena brand she co-owns with Charlie Crocker.

The latter is a scion of the famous or infamous (depending upon one’s political proclivities) California Crockers, who established banks and railroads dating to the Gold Rush. But it’s Pam Starr who is the real star in the Napa Valley winery business that was established 10 years ago.

Located just south of the town of St. Helena, the 50-acre Crocker Vineyard sits in what Starr refers to as a “nook” off Highway 29, the main artery that runs through the region. Starr is very intimate with that vineyard, calling herself a “soil translator”, which she prefers to the term “terroir denizen.”

Fresh from a honeymoon, Starr once thought she’d be a dentist but, as she is fond of saying, “Thank God I fell off that truck.” Instead, she wound up at Sonoma-Cutrer, which was bullish on Chardonnay, before she landed as the winemaker of mostly Cabernet Sauvignon at the great St. Helena property, Spottswoode from 1992 to ’97.

At Crocker & Starr, she makes a $28 Sauvignon Blanc from the clone Sauvignon Musque (some of which also comes from the Hyde Vineyard in the Carneros), a $50 Cabernet Franc and a $90 Cabernet-based wine called Stone Place. I tasted the latter, the 2003, and thought it had site-specific herbal flavors and complex mineral layers, which was seductive, similar to Pam Starr’s jaunty personality.