Massican

Massican, Napa · two places, one name

Dan Petroski grew up in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn, in a house where wine was present but only just. The San Francisco Chronicle told the story when it named him its Winemaker of the Year in 2017: his Italian mother, Annia, bought a bottle of red every Saturday and drank one glass a night, over ice. “It would last her through Friday,” Petroski remembers, “then Saturday she’d buy a new bottle.” Years later, working in Napa, he started a label of his own for a reason Robb Report puts plainly: to make Napa Valley white wines his mother could afford, since the Larkmead Cabernets were out of her reach. The label he started makes nothing but white wine. He named it for a mountain, and he named its flagship for her.

Monte Massico is a ridge in Campania, north of Naples; the Romans knew it as Mons Massicus. Petroski’s mother’s family grew up, as the winery puts it, “in the shadows of the Massican hills,” and the name came to Napa with him, along with a pronunciation the About page has to spell out: MAH-see-con. He told Wine Spectator what he wanted from the wine: “a blended Italian white that reminded me of the saline, fresh, floral wines I drank in Sicily, the wind blowing in my face as I stared at the Mediterranean Sea and that told a story about my ties to my mother’s Italian family.” The grapes are Italian; the ground is not. Annia is Tocai Friulano and Ribolla Gialla with Chardonnay and Pinot Bianco, drawn, the winery says, from vineyards in Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma, and that spread is why the label reads California rather than Napa Valley. It is the honest version of a hard claim: a wine from a Napa-based house whose home ground runs well past its own county line and, in memory, to one ridge in Campania. Petroski said it in one sentence: “Massican lives in two places: my memories in Italy, but born in Napa.”

What the About page says, and what it doesn’t

The practice is unfussy and precise. By the winery’s own numbers the current Annia is 44 percent Tocai Friulano, 37 Ribolla Gialla, 13 Chardonnay and 6 Pinot Bianco, fermented 84 percent in neutral French oak and the rest in steel, finished at 11.8 percent alcohol with almost no sugar left. The Tocai comes from Chiles Valley, Mendocino and the Russian River; the Ribolla from Oak Knoll, Mendocino, the Russian River and a vineyard in Lodi; the Chardonnay is from the Barra vineyard in Mendocino, organic and planted in 1975; the Pinot Bianco is Napa fruit from Yountmill. That Lodi vineyard is worth a second look. The same page that lists it says Annia carries a California appellation “because the grapes are farmed in Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma vineyards.” Lodi is in none of the three. The label is correct either way, and the stated reason leaves a county out. Nearly three quarters of the vineyards are farmed organically, and none of them uses glyphosate. By the winery’s own reckoning, Annia takes 45 percent of all the Tocai and 35 percent of all the Ribolla planted in California, which is another way of saying that these grapes’ American home ground is, for now, mostly one wine.

Why Massican Matters

One thing the About page does not say is who owns the winery. Gallo acquired Massican in a deal announced at the end of August 2023, Robb Report reported, calling it “Napa Valley’s first, and to date, only, exclusively white-wine winery.” Petroski framed the sale, in the same piece, as the end of “10 years of Massican being a side hustle,” and the production numbers agree: a first vintage of 400 cases that had grown to 7,500 by the year before the deal. The winery’s own page still reads as the story of a mother and a mountain, with no owner named, which is worth noticing and worth no more than that. What the bottle offers in a month about home ground is the most American version of the idea: a place kept alive as a name, poured from ground that is not the place at all. Annia, pronounced Ah-KNEE-ah, is the mother who bought one bottle a week. The wine that carries her name is the one built to be afforded.

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White Blend

Massican Annia White 2025

California

Tocai Friulano and Ribolla Gialla with Chardonnay and Pinot Bianco, from Napa, Mendocino, and Sonoma vineyards — the flagship white of a Napa house that makes nothing else, named for its founder’s mother. $30.97.

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