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With all of the hoopla surrounding so many new projects around the Napa Valley, it’s easy to miss some of the old ones doing business the way it’s always been done here. Take John Gantner Jr. and Nancy Walker’s School House Vineyard high atop Spring Mountain. Gantner is actually a direct descendant of General Salvadore Vallejo, and this mountaintop vineyard property was once part of Vallejo’s massive California empire as well as the home of the area’s lone school house that provided the vineyard with its name. There’s a tiny plot of Zinfandel vines (interplanted, as was the custom in those days, with several other old varieties) that dates mostly from 1890 that is still producing great wine, but it was Gantner’s dad, John Sr., who first planted Pinot Noir on the mountain in the 1950s at the suggestion of Napa Valley legends Andre Tchelistcheff and John Daniel. They provided the vine cuttings, all culled from the original Romanée-Conti Burgundy selection grubbed up at Inglenook so they could plant better-suited Cab instead. These are not the ‘suitcase selection’ of Burgundy clones we often see, but the real deal, and the source of Beaulieu’s legendary ‘Burgundies’ of the 1940s and early ’50s. Later came the School House Chardonnay (planted with the famed Wente small berry clone given to Gantner by Stony Hill’s late Fred McCrae). These were the first plantings of these varieties on Spring Mountain and remain the oldest in production.

While their vineyard is an immovable institution, the actual Gantner School House wines have led a peripatetic existence since their first vintage in 1955. They’ve been made over the decades at wineries like Stony Hill, Caymus, Sterling, Schweiger and Pride Mountain Vineyards, as well as various garages! Winemakers have included names like Fred McCrae, Philip Togni, Bruce Scotland and Bob Foley. Until the most recent vintage, School House has been under the care of Bob Foley protégé Sally Johnson. Considering the reputation Pride has for making wines of prodigious power, Bob and Sally have shown surprising restraint with the School House Pinot, preserving the old clone’s sexy Côtes de Nuits-like nose and its haunting evanescent mouthfeel. This is no powerhouse California-style look-alike; this is classic Pinot Noir cut from a Burgundian pattern providing elegant drinking when young but capable of decades and decades of cellaring. A 1958 tasted at the property some years ago was still fresh as a daisy!

And remember this: When you open a School House Pinot Noir of any vintage, be sure to give it lots of air. It is only after some time in the decanter that it begins to unfold its layers of incredible aromas and flavors. We’ve got our hands on the 2021, which, at five years past the harvest, is reaching perfection!

Wine Spectator, 95 points: This is both old-school and generous in feel, with mulled morello cherry and blackberry fruit providing a fleshy core as baking spice, sage, black tea, wet pine and sassafras notes fill in liberally throughout. Offers good underlying grip through the finish. Drink now through 2036. 222 cases made.