The Moueix family are as close to royalty as one gets in Bordeaux. Owners of Petrus, Trotanoy, La Fleur Petrus, and a legion of other heavyweight estates, they are the Kings of Bordeaux’s Right Bank. Not content with reigning in Bordeaux though, they were also one of the first French winemaking families to buy land in California and bring their expertise to Napa. In the late 1960s, Christian Moueix, son of the company’s founding father, J-P, travelled to California to study, only returning home in 1970 to manage the family’s great chateaux. Longing to return to the West Coast though, he did so in 1981, discovering that the legendary Napanook Vineyard was for sale. As this special piece of land was responsible for some of the greatest wines to be made in California during in the 1940s and 1950s it had become intrinsically linked with Hollywood’s Golden Age; he was smitten. So taking all of his experience garnered from managing the Moueix family’s titanic properties, Christian applied his understanding and deep emotional connection with the Napa Valley to the stunning Napanook estate, giving life to a new Grand Vin, christened ‘Dominus’. The results are wines that perfectly bridge the gap between the generosity and density of Napa’s best fruit and the structure, precision, and age-worthiness of top Bordeaux. It is considered rightly amongst Napa’s ‘1st Growth’ estates and the most ‘French’ stylistically. As Moueix wrote on the label: “Napa terroir but with a Bordeaux spirit.”
