Materra Right Bank Red Napa Valley 2019

If you’re a wine lover, you cannot help but to be extremely jealous of Chelsea Barrett. She had the wine education of which the rest of us could only dream.

Chelsea grew up in the company of idols. Her father, Bo, has been the winemaker at Chateau Montelena since 1972 and was the big winner in the famous Judgment of Paris. Her mother Heidi – a bonafide superstar and a founding winemaker for legendary cult names such as Screaming Eagle, Dalla Valle and La Sirena.

Naturally, Chelsea got the greatest lessons in wine that money couldn’t buy from her parents, but she was determined to go far outside of California to learn even more. She traveled the world’s wine regions extensively, interning in Austria, Two Hands in Australia and eventually Opus One in Napa.

While she originally came back to help her mother with her various winemaking duties – she ended up hanging up a shingle of her own, Aviatrix – a brand that would announce her to the rest of the world as a serious winemaker of her own.

That led the Cunat Family in Napa to task her with winemaking duties for Materra Wines, where Chelsea gets to play with a bunch of Bordeaux varietals in the family’s 50-acre Oak Knoll Vineyard. The 2019 vintage was Chelsea’s first so naturally I grabbed every single case I could of her Materra Right Bank – an ode to her time living and working in Bordeaux.