Very limited!
Tasting Notes
Exceedingly dense and complex, we find in Beckstoffer Las Piedras a seductive perfume of blackberry, cherry liqueur, cedar, wildflowers, bramble, roasted game, black pepper, and dark chocolate. While the multilayered silky mouthfeel impresses with crème de cassis, baking spice, and abundant ripe tannins, the purity, depth, and trademark wet-stone profile take center stage.
-All the charm of St Helena with a bit more structure than Dr Crane.
Blend: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon. Only 14 barrels (350 cases)!
 
Inspiration
Where the foothills meet the valley floor in St. Helena, there’s a tranquil, remote, rocky vineyard called Beckstoffer Las Piedras. It is still here, across Sulphur Creek from St. Helena cemetery. In the 1920s this area was the home to St. Helena’s Chinese community. This wine’s musical inspiration is “Sleepyhead,” a 2009 song by Passion Pit that deals with themes of isolation and indecision. Croatian artist Paolo Čerić’s label design features the face of a sleeping woman overlain with spiral grooves, like those of a vinyl record.
Terroir
Low-yielding and with excellent drainage, thanks to its proximity to Sulphur Creek, Beckstoffer Las Piedras is bounded by foothills and a few scattered homes. Vice Versa also sources from blocks that once went into Schrader Cellars’ LPV Cabernet Sauvignon. This site’s gravelly character always seems to imbue the wines with the most minerality in the portfolio.
Vice Versa was founded by Ottawa native and entrepreneur Patrice Breton. From his youth, Patrice always sought a vocation that would combine his passions: creativity, science, art and culture, and he finally found this nexus in Vice Versa. 2024 will mark Vice Versa’s 22nd vintage in the Napa Valley. Patrice learned winemaking at the side of Paul Hobbs who produced several vintages in the early 2000s with Patrice but were never released. Patrice learned as much as he could during his time directly working with Hobbs. The first commercial release of Vice Versa was from the 2003 vintage. Paul was winemaker from 2003 through 2013. When Paul began to become busier with his own consulting clients and international projects Philippe Melka and his team including winemaker Maayan Koschitzky were brought on board to craft the wines. They made some changes in the winemaking including introducing longer fermentation times, longer maceration times and never using any pressed juice.
Today, Spencer Kelly heads a winemaking team which also includes Philippe Melka and Maayan Koschitzky of Atelier Melka. They and every other member of our coterie are driven by passion for our shared métier.
We acquired an estate vineyard in Calistoga in 2019, and the summer of 2024 will see the launch of a new winery facility there. Our greatest wines are perpetually ahead of us.
Their labels have been designed by two of the best in the business – first by Chuck House of Icon Design Group and a more recent completely different iteration by Napa based Richard Von Saal of VonSaal Design which ties in an image relating to ‘vice versa’ using curvilinear lines while also representing the Fibonacci sequence (where each subsequent number is the addition of the two preceding ones, starting from 0 and 1).