Dennis Fife
Have you ever noticed that things you love have a sort of power—one might even say an agenda? They compel you to do things: The dark chocolate bar that convinces you to eat it...The new car that coerces you into taking it home....
Vineyards are the worst. They seduce you into buying them (or starting them from scratch). And then there are the vines. At night they invade your dreams, filling your head with visions of the wines they could become. Pretty soon, you realize you're entirely under their spell. Some very primal message has gurgled up through the land and you—a farmer, after all—cannot pretend you didn't hear it.
And so it was that in the late 1980s, a vineyard high atop Spring Mountain lured me into buying it and starting Fife Vineyards. I had spent my entire career in the wine business, notably at the Napa Valley's two most historic properties—Beaulieu Vineyards, where I was vice president, and Inglenook Napa Valley, where I was president. In 1996, I married Karen MacNeil, whom I had met when she interviewed me for an article she was writing. Karen is the author of the best selling wine book in America, The Wine Bible. She is the host of the new PBS television series "Wine, Food, and Friends with Karen MacNeil" and the Chairman of the wine department at the Culinary Institute of America in the Napa Valley.
Among the things we feel most passionate about are making wines with beauty—wines which we think of as having a "European sensibility"; caring for these gorgeous mountain vineyards; and sharing our excitement for wine with the American public.
Among our pet peeves:
- The absurdity of the concept of the generalized vintage assessment a concept with no objective intellectual foundation and no consensus of opinion. Why do we keep creating nonsense reasons not to purchase wine?
- The propensity of some retailers to rely solely on a given critic’s ratings to sell wine. What happened to knowing something about the wines you sell?
- Poorly written or absurdly generalized back labels, e.g., “Food suggestions: goes well with meat, fish, or pasta.”
