Written by Scott Becker

David Abreu of David Abreu Vineyard Management (DAVM) and Abreu Vineyards is one of the most revered and sought-after vineyard managers in Napa Valley. A Napa native who has spent his life in the valley, David's knowledge of Napa's geography, geology and viticultural history is nearly unparalleled. His son, Matteo Abreu, works with him closely as part of the next generation entering the business. Scott Becker sat down with David and Matteo for this interview on August 9, 2023.

David, tell us about your early memories of Napa Valley. What was it like growing up here?

My family had a farming background. We had dairy, beef and a few row crops. French prunes, some walnut trees. And grapes too, the varieties common back then like Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Carignane. That was at our place in Rutherford. We had horses and rode them long distances. I used to show horses in fact. We'd milk the Holsteins, hunt and fish. The river was pristine. We used to pick watercress down there and make unbelievable salads.

Back then, I'm talking the late 1950s and '60s, I was allowed to roam. Up to Calistoga and over to Chiles and Pope Valley, because we also had a ranch over there. Chuck Wagner (proprietor of Caymus Vineyards) and I were out there almost every weekend. At first we rode our bicycles, all the way from Rutherford over Howell Mountain to Chiles. When we were about 12 or 13, we switched to dirt bikes. We had cattle out there, Black Angus, and the neighbors had alfalfa and sheep. I remember helping with the sheep one time, bringing them in for shearing, and I saw all these redwood stakes going up the side of the hill. At first I was like, what the heck are these things? Then I thought, wow, there had to be grapes out here in the mid-1800s and they just got abandoned.

We'd stay in a bunkhouse and all our food was homemade, even the mayonnaise and ketchup. There was meat in the freezer, lamb, beef, some venison. And we'd do chores, like fixing irrigation pipes, etc. It was beautiful out there. The alfalfa fields were pristine, the fence lines were tidy. Our exposure was tremendous. We had space to roam. I raised homing pigeons, tagged and taught them how to fly from our ranch in Chiles Valley to Rutherford.

Eventually Chuck and I switched to motorcycles. I had a Harley 250 Sprint. We'd hang out near Lake Hennessy at a spot where people used to have parties (it's a dam now), head over to Lake Berryessa where girls hung out. We even went to Yosemite and up to Burney Falls on those bikes.

That sounds pretty idyllic. What else do you remember?

All the neighbors knew each other, and there were so many personalities and hard, hard workers. With crops, you know, some were up, some were down. But we survived by selling dairy milk, beef, prunes, grapes. There was no farmers' market. Everyone had big gardens and people would trade produce. I remember riding on the back of my dad's truck delivering grapes to Sunny St. Helena, the co-op where everyone sold their grapes. I wasn't really supposed to, but I just hung onto the ropes in back. We picked into wooden boxes then, and we'd drive up and load the grapes right into the hopper.

What did you do after high school?

I got drafted in 1968 and spent the next two and a half years in Vietnam in the army. I went straight from training camp to an area north of Da Nang. I was in the artillery. I remember being up to my knees in water with mosquitoes everywhere. But I was kind of excited about being there, about launching. I even extended my time there by six months.

I got picked up by a major for a communications job in Cambodia. I didn't know if it was a good or bad thing, because we always had to go in first and set up the equipment. We were always being attacked. I spent some time in Saigon with colonels and two- and three-star generals, driving them around. I listened, saw how they conducted themselves. They were pretty special people for sure. They got after it, they were not sleepyheads. I learned about adhering to discipline and order. It was interesting, and I was able to use that learning. Even now I find myself gravitating to people like that.

Toward the end of my time I partnered with a gunner who was 60 years old with white hair. He was scary. He was on his sixth tour. I went out with him every day, and it was crazy. By then I'm thinking, "What the hell am I doing out here? I have 30 days left." I came back to Napa in 1970.

You're out of the army, back from Vietnam. What did you do then?

I worked at Inglenook at first. My uncle, Al Del Bondio, was running the winery and I helped with the farming and other things. That's when it was owned by Hublein. I met Cary Gott there and Dennis Fife. Eventually I took over the farming, and they put Ric Forman alongside me because I was so young.

Chuck Wagner and I were still good friends, and Charlie, his dad, liked me. They didn't have the winery yet, that opened in 1972. But they had about 70 acres of vineyard in Rutherford going nearly to the Silverado Trail. And there was the Honig ranch down the road on 128. That was 67 acres. I worked in the vineyards at Honig with Chuck, and also at the winery during harvest, doing punch downs and other stuff. Remember there weren't a whole lot of wineries in the valley then. There was Heitz, there were some big guys, and there was the co-op, where growers would take their grapes for $250 a ton.

I was at Honig for five years, and I was getting restless. I went back to work at Caymus for a short time, and that's when Dick Grace was making wine there. He needed help with his vineyard.

At that time, in the mid-'70s, you're starting to realize there's an opportunity to do your own thing, to start a farming company. What were you thinking at the time?

Well, I had Dick Grace's vineyard, which was just an acre. And then I met Sally Meyer, who owned Madrona Ranch. The vineyard was diseased, and she asked me to take a look. There weren't many farming companies back then, just a few individuals. Most families farmed their own properties. But I saw an opportunity. Sally put up the capital to replant 16 acres, which we did in 1980. And when we got a crop in '83 she said "Here, this is yours now. You farm it off this income." She was very generous. So I sold the grapes from that property. That was the start of my vineyard management company.

Talk about the early years of DAVM. You've got Madrona, Inglenook and Grace. How did you feel about the business and farming in general?

Well, I wasn't making any money. I had a finance person from Germany who did all my books, and I wasn't making money. I mean I was making money, but it was all going back into the business. That was the early 1980s. Then I met Bill Harlan, and we connected. He asked me to develop his vineyard, and we planted that whole face out in the front part of his property in Oakville. Then the Staglins come along in 1986, with their 40-acre property. I developed those vineyards from scratch. I knew the area up there (the west side of Oakville) from my dad, who did construction at the Carmelite church. The dirt there always caught my eye, how good it looked. And I started to work with the Araujos in 1989.

Your business is starting to take off; you're starting to have a who's who of clients. Maybe it didn't feel that way then, but looking back at it?

I use the word "luck" a little bit, just how Bill and I connected. Again, it goes back to the military and the kind of people I admire. Bill was one of those individuals. Garen Staglin and the Araujos too. I just knew when I met them. Robert Mondavi also. When I shook his hand, I knew he was a worker. He had calloused hands.

You made your first vintage of Abreu Vineyards wine in 1986. What were the circumstances around that?

Well, to back up, I had no interest in making wine. I was all about viticulture, and it's always been that way, even today. Viticulture is so fascinating, just what I see when I drive through this valley or go up to Spring Mountain or Howell Mountain, take 128 into Chiles Valley and go on to all these properties. I'm looking at road cuts and the profile of the dirt. I can pick up on the differences very, very quickly. Like Mt. Veeder or Oakville Grade, where there's a lot of shale.

What would you call that skill you just described?

There's something, I'm not sure what. The Napa River might have triggered something for me. I farmed Star Vineyard for a long time and the Wilsey property was right next door. They were right by the river, and we used to go down to play around and fish. I just remember the profile of those river banks. I could tell where the Indians had settled. The reason there's so much solid ground is the silt. We used to flood here, I mean major flooding in Napa Valley. So you see these deposits just stacking up and stacking up, where it gets wider and deeper. People used to maintain the river and keep it clean because if you didn't, the water would come over and flood your place, tear it apart. But I would study the deposits that developed.

I also look at gopher tailings. I don't need a backhoe to come in and dig down three or ten feet or whatever. I just see these tailings and I know.

So back to 1986. You don't really want to make wine, but you want to put something in the bottle.

In '86 Ric Forman gave me one tank and I put Cabernet and Cabernet Franc from Madrona in there. Ric had a blending tank in his house, he didn't have a cave yet. My three barrels were up in this room that had no temperature control. I had brand new Nadalié barrels because Ric had brought those in from France. But I didn't release that wine. It's buried in the barn somewhere.

In the first vintages I did all the pump overs and finished the fermentation in about ten days or so. No extended maceration. Pressed lightly and put the wine into new wood to go through malolactic. Eventually I came down to Merryvale with Bob Levy and Bill Harlan because I needed a place to keep the barrels.

You have some wine in the bottle, the farming business is growing and becoming more successful. Were you starting to feel a change in Napa Valley?

The '80s felt pretty normal, not a lot of movement. The glitter really started in the 1990s. It seemed like there was a lot of new money coming into the valley. There were a few who came before 1990, but all of a sudden there was land that sold for $40,000 an acre. That was a big number. I never forgot that number.

But that's also when phylloxera hit. Between me and a couple other vineyard managers we pulled about 35,000 acres of AXR vines in the '90s. Some people were in denial, still planting on AXR. There were some real mistakes being made. But it was also a fresh start here. We started working with a dozen or so new rootstocks and changed the way we designed vineyards.

What influenced you as you made these changes to the vineyards?

It was a bunch of little pieces. Part of it was learning from other people's mistakes, seeing how some would go for these massive crop loads. They'd lease a vineyard and milk it for everything they could get, then give it back to the owner dead, dead, dead. But you have to remember that these were farmers, that's how they made their money. They had no interest in the wine side of it. It was all about tons. The vineyard rows were 12 feet wide so you could run a big tractor and a disc through them.

It was the wines I was buying too, from a shop in Marin. I was buying good wine, like '59 and '61 Bordeaux, it was like a candy store. We would put food on a 16' foot table with big platters and just bottles of wine. And the smells from those wines were just awesome. When I was deciding on a bottle for the Abreu wines I bought an 1896 Latour along with 12 or 14 other bottles from the late 1800s and early 1900s, all hand-blown. The Latour had been topped off in 1968, and I brought it out at the end of the night. That was the bottle that felt right, and I had a mold made which I still use.

I also started going to Bordeaux two times a year with Ric (Forman), who had the connections. I'd spend time in the vineyards because that's what I was interested in, not necessarily the wineries. I wanted to learn what the French did out there, because I thought some of our farming was pretty crude. It always bothered me to be there in August and come home and start our harvest and hear they'd gotten wiped out over there because of rain. Some people here would clap their hands but that bothered me. The French would land maybe one out of ten harvests, and I understood the whole thing.

What were some of the changes you made in the vineyards?

The big thing with me was that the equipment did not dictate how I was going to lay a vineyard out. In the '50s, '60s and '70s equipment dictated how people farmed. It was about their Caterpillar D4s, D2s, their 10-foot disc,12-foot disc, rollers, whatever it was. And I watched all of that. I shrunk up the planting space, that was a big thing. I understood our weather here and saw a better way to ripen the fruit. I went from 12 feet spacing to 5' x 3' or 6' x 3'. There was a balance of clusters on both halves of the vines that caught my eye. And row orientation changed. We were looking at the sun and temperature and managing the canopies differently.

I also moved away from cordon pruning. That was an easier way of pruning, and also cheaper. Cane pruning requires more skill, you have to know which suckers to leave for the following year. You're laying down new wood every year which requires more skill. But Eutypa (a fungal disease) was coming into the valley in the '90s and if you cordon pruned you might lose a vine's arm. We went to cane pruning in the late '90s.

Moving into the 2000s, what was happening around that time?

There were some awesome vintages in the 1990s, but in the early 2000s a lot of people were pushing the fruit too far. Things got overripe. I smelled wine that was like lacquer. And everything was accelerated because there was more demand. My clients didn't push me to hang the fruit too long, but a lot of people did. They were kind of like sheep. They started making prune juice. But there were also some pretty awesome wines from the 2000s.

When did you buy the Las Posadas Howell Mountain vineyard?

In 2001. It was my first land purchase. It belonged to a couple going through a divorce. The guy wanted to keep it but he couldn't make it work. I was patient. I'd drive by the property three or four times a week because we mountain biked up there. It wasn't planted when I bought it, but it had terraces carved across it. I saw that soil there, that red Aiken soil, it was unbelievable.

I knew Randy Dunn and others on Howell Mountain, and I knew it was all about 100% Cabernet Sauvignon up there. Nobody was growing Cabernet Franc or Merlot except for Beringer on the Bancroft Ranch. I wanted to plant Franc and Merlot because I wanted those Bordeaux blends. It goes back to the wines I was tasting and studying, those first, second and third growth Bordeaux.

And how about Capella in St. Helena?

I planted Capella the same year, 2002. I'd pulled the old vineyard which had been there back in the 1920s. But the St. George rootstock I planted had black goo (a fungus disease), and I had to rip it all out. It took six years to get a crop there.

Then we get into the 2010s. What was the next land purchase?

That wasArns in 2019. We now call it Thorevilos. We'd gotten a tip that the brothers who owned it wanted to sell. Well, one wanted to hold onto it, but the other didn't. They'd bought that property in 1966 and there was a lot of history there. And water, which is important. But then the whole place burned in 2020.

And Madrona Ranch came up in 2021. Buddy (Sally's son) decided to sell after the 2020 fires. Before it'd been a sharecropping arrangement with the family.

What did it mean to you to buy Madrona 41 years after you started leasing it?

You know, that's a great question. I go on that property and I don't even think about any of that. I don't really think about how I own this now. It's been so many years. And we have a great relationship with Buddy and his kids. Buddy moved to a state where he has more space. And the kids are excited about
me owning the property. I made it clear that if they want to come back and build up the hill where their house used to be (it burned in the fire) they can. We've cleaned it all up, cleared the brush away.

Switching gears, tell me what it's like to have your son in the business? Was that a discussion you had from an early age?

David: I think it was pretty easy. It was natural.

Matteo: Actually it's all three of us, me, Rico and Lucia. Lucia is doing her first summer in the office. And Rico and I talk weekly about work, so he's basically up to date on everything.

David: And when he's home, he's out in the field with our guys. He knows all of them. But you know, back to the question, I've never asked my kids "Are you going to do this? Are you going to do that?" I don't lay there at night thinking, "Are they just going to walk away from all this?" I think about things I want to get done here. I want to keep moving.

Matteo, tell us about your awareness of the business and vineyards growing up and how you decided to make a formal commitment to join DAVM.

Matteo: We started doing summer internships from about fifth grade. It was me, Rico and Buddy's kids, my cousin and a few others. We worked at Madrona and Capella, doing basic tasks. But we got paid for it. Before that, growing up, we'd always be out in the vineyard, down at Star Vineyard by the creek. I didn't really know what the business was at that time. But after high school, I definitely got more familiar and during college a lot more familiar. And then post-college because I went and studied the science behind it, viticulture, and then horticulture, soils, soil chemistry, the whole nine yards with viruses, plant pathology and so on.

David: All those kids kept working, all the way through high school.

Matteo: Yeah. But most of them went on to other things eventually. Most people don't like working in the vineyards. I mean, who likes going out there and pulling laterals, and being in the sun shoveling dirt? We'd get into fistfights out there because you just get cabin fever in the row. You get a little bit stir-crazy being out there. You've got to credit the guys that are in the vineyards every single day, every year, because they're with the same people having the same conversations, doing ohe same work. You get a serious feel for that as you get older. But that's why we take care of our guys. My dad's done a great job keeping his crews happy and well off.

You went to Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo?

Matteo: First I did two years of community college, general courses, and I ran track. I also ran track all through high school and showed livestock. My dad had us on a traveling team showing pigs all around the state. Rico started it, then I did the majority of the California shows and my sister did the national shows. We progressed into this upper level and we won state fair once and I got reserve twice. I also worked pig shows in college when I was a student at Cal Poly. And through track I got to travel all through southern California which was a fun part of my life.

Were you already thinking at that time that you'd come back into the business?

Matteo: Yeah, I don't think there was a time I didn't think I'd come back. I started here in summer of 2018. So it's been five years now. I'm going into my fifth harvest.

What's that progression been like for you?

Matteo: It was a lot of tractor driving my first two years. And that got me skilled at going onto ranches and being able to notice if something isn't looking the way it should look. Which I needed, I needed that experience. Now I help out in the office more, with development prep, plant ordering, etc. But I still do vineyard walks with our clients weekly. I call myself an operations manager because I help make everything happen. My dad makes the decisions and I gotta make sure it happens. Or if it doesn't happen, it gets fixed right away.

What did it feel like when you first came back? Was there any pressure to prove yourself to the guys in the field because they knew you were David's son?

Matteo: No, I liked driving the tractor, so that's what I did. And I still like to get out in the vineyard. It's a stress reliever to do hand labor. I don't have to get up and shovel every single day, but I definitely like to spend a little bit of time doing hand labor. Once a month I try to spend a half to a full day, because it's almost like you're bringing yourself back to zero. You can get really caught up looking at numbers and spreadsheets and solving problems. So yeah, if I get a break, I like to get out for sure.

What kind of conversations do you and your dad have about the business? Do you talk about decisions that need to be made about a new client or how to replant something?

Matteo: We have meetings in different places all the time, brief meetings. The ones that aren't scheduled are the most productive. It's been super healthy between us. We haven't gotten into any arguments this year. Last year, maybe one or two. And the year before, maybe once.

What do you think is the key to that?

Matteo: We know each other really well. I know that if you push his limit, you just have to chill out and come back at a different time. And my dad has never been about spoiling me. I'm not interested in having too much money in my life.

But I think it's more than that. Napa Valley doesn't do generational change all that well, and I'm curious why this one works. I'm energized by the relationship the two of you have and how you've approached coming into the business. I think it's rare.

David: I think there are a lot of pieces to it, how you build that relationship. From the day you learned how to hit a baseball to when you first played football or learned how to swim in the ocean.

Matteo: And my dad gave us a lot of space. Told us to just get out of the house, go roam. We'd go all over the valley on our dirt bikes. He taught us to ride; in the spring when mustard grew between the vine rows, he'd pull out a bunch of flowers every five feet to make a kind of obstacle course. We'd have to learn how to weave the bikes through it, kind of like taking a motorcycle license class.

David: I put nettle down when Lucia was learning. She knew if that bike laid over she'd fall into the nettle. These were Honda 50s with the wheelbarrow tires, and we had tracks that were just lined with nettle.

Matteo: Another thing was the mountain bike rides we'd do as a family every Sunday up in Los Posadas. We were always up in Angwin.

David: And it was all these things outside that you got to do. We were not people sitting on a couch watching TV. Even today. I mean there's nothing on TV other than tennis and a little bit of golf.

What are your thoughts about Napa Valley right now, and in the future, say 25 years from now?

David: I think about our kids' schoolmates and how a lot of them have been pushed out of this valley because of the price of living here. I think about the kids going to school to learn winemaking. They come here and try to buy a piece of land, or buy grapes, and it's just gotten so far away from them now. They can't get their foot in the door.

And I think about fire, and the extreme heat like we had last September. We can sit here and joke about earthquakes, but this is real. We're farming. There are scars out there. When you drive around the valley, you see scars from the fire. The viewshed is different. It will never be the same. We're marked here, and fire may well come again. There may be a lot of fires.

But you can't sit here and cry and whine about things that are coming our direction. I make decisions and it doesn't take me long to put things together. Just like those trees on the Arns property. Where can I get trees to get this whole 200-acre property replanted again? I want oaks, madrones, some conifers, firs and pines. Some bay. And then all of a sudden, these bushes are growing out there. So we prune them. For those of us who own land, we need to keep it clean. No Scotch broom, no poison oak, no underbrush whatsoever, just needles on the ground. Oaks grow in singles, madrones in group. We've planted trees that are already ten feet tall.

Matteo: I'm going to try to take the optimistic approach. It's important to recognize how much work my dad puts into his properties and how beneficial it is. I talk to our clients about something I call ranch hygiene. Your vineyard shouldn't be the only good-looking thing on your property. It should be your whole ranch, your barns, how you put things away, all of that. Even if you have 1000 acres, you should find ways to manage your land.

But there will be more regulations in the next few decades. I don't think we'll be able to develop any virgin ground in the next ten years. I think Napa County will axe all that. I think we'll only be able to replant what's an existing vineyard. Yeah. And the water regulations will get stricter.

So I think farming will go through a huge transition over the next 15 to 20 years. In 2050, I think it's going to be harder for us. I don't know what kind of regulations the wineries will have, but I know it's going to be harder to grow grapes here unless we start transitioning to more drought tolerant rootstock, which my dad has been preaching for the last 10 years now.

David: I think you want to be careful about the word 'harder.' It's just going to be different. You have to adapt. You want to be out in front of it. You can't just sit there. You have to use your brain. That's what we want to do. We want to be a model.

Do you worry at all about the issue of labor?

David: Not really. The key here is to stay young. Do not grow old in your workforce. You have to have young blood, keep a fresh mindset. And the people we have, they're excited about working for us and taking care of the ranches they're on. They're doing high-end work and they feel good about it. They feel a lot of pride in the work they do.

What would you say about the relationship between Realm and DAVM?

David: I can answer that more broadly. There are wines you know that should be made. Vineyards that deserve it. I'm about longevity with clients, not one or two years but year after year after year. I want to always excel above everybody else. And there are things we do viticulturally that separate us. And we like to work with winemakers who respect and appreciate our fruit, who understand that in the end it's all about that property, that soil, and the people who guided that fruit all year to get it to you.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.