Wine of the week: Bella Grace, 2021 Amador County, Estate Grenache Blanc

Michael Havill expected to retire in the Sierra Foothills with her husband Charlie. Instead, they bought a vineyard.

It wasn’t long before Havill decided to bottle their grapes. The unlikely winemaker is behind our wine of the week winner — the Bella Grace, 2021 Amador County, Estate Grenache Blanc, $13.5%, $26. Nice and dry, this grenache blanc is refreshing and buoyed by bright acid. It has aromas and flavors of apple, cucumber and honeydew melon. Impressive, it has nice length and finishes crisp, with a citrusy note.

At Bella Grace Vineyards, Havill said, it’s a “vine-to-glass” operation.

“Our belief is that 80%, if not more, of the winemaking happens in the vineyard,” she said. “That’s why we keep a hands-on look at what’s happening in our vines.”

In the last five to seven years, there have been about 300 to 400 additional acres of grenache blanc planted in California, coming to a total of about 700 acres, Havill said.

“It’s a unique varietal that people have come to enjoy as a staple at Bella Grace,” she said.

Havill, now in her 70s, has worked long days since the couple purchased their vineyard in 2004. The transplant spent more than two decades as a managing partner of New York Insurance company in Walnut Creek before moving to the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento.

“The industry bug caught us,” she said. “I’m a ’60s college dropout. My instincts and relationships with others who are smarter than me have always produced good results.”

Havill says her resilience perhaps comes from having a first name typically reserved for men.

“When I was growing up in the 1940s, my mother and grandmother listened to a detective show on the radio, and the heroine was a woman named Michael,” Havill said. “They thought it was a good, strong name for a woman because these two were very strong and very liberated for that era.”

Havill said she has no intention of retiring anytime soon. She’s too busy farming grapes.

“We truly strive to have the best-quality estate crop,” she said. “Utilizing cover crops like oaks, beans and peas, we’re able to provide essential sources of organic matter and nutrients to our soil.”

After pruning, she said, she mulches the canes with cover crop in the spring.

“After this, we use Charlie’s favorite tractor implement — the spader,” Havill said. “All this requires much more effort than some vineyard practices, but this investment in the health of the vineyard shows in the quality of the wines, especially the grenache blanc.”

One of their favorite stories, she said, is how they were inspired by the late vintner Koerner Rombauer.

“We met him at a vintners’ event and hit it off,” Havill said. “After learning that we wanted to buy a vineyard, he firmly said, ‘Go to Amador County.’ We quickly fell in love with the beauty that Amador has to offer.”

Wine writer Peg Melnik can be reached at peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5310.