Winemaker Miguel Caratachea sensed that something was wrong that day. It was October 8, 2017, and winds were picking up across drought-scorched Napa Valley. Most of the harvest was in except for the most prized grapes of all: the Cabernet Sauvignon grown high up the slopes that make Napa Valley’s most award-winning wines. They would be ripe and ready to pick in a week or so.
It was a Sunday, the vineyard workers’ only off day during harvest, and most were attending services with their families. Miguel emerged from his church as usual, when he felt a sickening sense of danger in the air. While the rest of the valley took a breather, Miguel went into action. He called his crew to follow him up a windy dirt road to a remote, highly prized vineyard on a ridge of Spring Mountain. “The fires are coming,” he told them. “We need to pick now.”
Amid searing, eye-watering winds, Miguel and his crew began picking. In the early evening, as Miguel had foreseen, the hills caught fire, and flames quickly encircled Napa Valley. Miguel’s men picked their grapes by the light of the oncoming fire until three o’clock the next morning. Then, through the stifling heat of the inferno, they escaped down a steep back road with their lives – and pickups loaded with the last grapes picked in Napa Valley that year. Remarkably, when fires again struck Napa Valley in 2020, Miguel again got the last grapes harvested. The charred trees across from the ridgetop vineyard still testify to his crew’s bravery and dedication.
It’s a story often told among Napa Valley wine insiders, one of many about Miguel Caratachea and his uncanny sense for the grapes.
Miguel has been the unnamed creative force for numerous boutique Napa Valley wineries, helping them amass nearly 200 wines rated 90+ in the three leading wine publications (Wine Spectator, Wine Advocate, Wine Enthusiast). But his name has never appeared on a label. Until now.
Miguel’s story is a classic American story of immigration and assimilation. The youngest of eleven children, Miguel’s family came from the small mountain town of Atacheo in central Mexico, near the destination of the famous monarch butterfly migration in Michoacan state. Miguel visited there as a boy. He credits this experience for giving him a lifelong wonder of nature.
“I was the youngest. When I was a baby, my mom cooked with one arm and held me with the other. There were a lot of kids, so there was a lot of cooking! I think that’s when I got attuned to aromas and flavors. My dad was a good farmer, all the growers wanted him. He was a field worker in the 1950s Bracero program and came to Napa Valley. He told me stories about the vines. I got my feeling for the grapes from him.”
During his first year at St. Helena High School Miguel took a job at Frog’s Leap Winery, working after school and weekends to help make ends meet. It didn’t take long for the shy kid who spoke mostly Spanish to be promoted beyond lugging hoses and cleaning tanks. He soon became fluent in all three languages of Napa Valley – English, Spanish, and wine.
Miguel’s natural instincts quickly shone as he worked his way up, making wines for a host of wineries located throughout the valley, starting as cellarmaster at Stonegate at age twenty. His reputation grew, and winemakers at other small, elite wineries began asking for his help. By age 29, he was able to work full-time as a consulting winemaker to high-end wineries.
Miguel’s humble background meant that he never got an opportunity for formal academic training. Like many of the pioneers who launched Napa Valley’s rise to fame fifty years ago, he is self-taught. So he has never been constrained by an orthodox “recipe” or techniques. Miguel has worked side-by-side with over forty winemakers with a wide range of styles, including some from Napa Valley’s first wave of luxury winemaking in the 1960s and 70s. He learned from them and, increasingly, they learned from him. He has become known for bringing together secrets of the old masters with his own imaginative techniques discovered while working independently in the cellar late into the night.
This has led to a style all his own with rich Napa Valley fruit but surprises with balance, complexity, and textures that would be more familiar to Bordeaux aficionados. In blind tastings, Miguel’s wines can often be singled out by their lively, engaging palate, flowing complexity, feather-like tannins, and adherence to terroir.
Miguel has worked throughout Napa Valley in over 100 vineyards. He stays close to the vines, getting to know each site’s “personality,” as he puts it, which has led him to overlooked vineyards that he believes offer distinct character and depth. A few of these are now the sources for his new Caratachea label.
When the Smithsonian Institution opened its high-profile exhibit at the Napa Valley Museum in 2017, museum officials asked area winemakers to recommend local wines for the opening gala. The vintners suggested wines made by Miguel, which were exclusively served for the event (under the Punch Vineyards label). Beyond the honor of that big stage, Miguel said he was more excited to know that his work was held in such high regard by his peers and friends – other Napa Valley winemakers.
In a world where snobbery often goes with status, Miguel is universally regarded as a really good guy both as a boss and a neighbor by the people closest to the wines. After the earthquake and fires of recent years, Miguel’s pickup truck has reliably been one of the first to show up at emergency centers, loaded with food and water and other supplies for people driven out of their homes. He routinely delivers donuts and coffee to his crews during harvest – “I work in the vineyards myself. It’s very hard.”
Miguel has a loyal following among those closest to Napa Valley’s famed wines – namely, men and women who work the fields and cellars, most of whom have roots in Mexico. Since 2013, they have tuned in and called in to Miguel’s weekly sports talk show on KBBF, America’s oldest Spanish radio station. That radio connection has helped Miguel become the central contact of perhaps the best-informed network in Napa Valley wine; he and his wine industry listeners trade tips on growing conditions, new techniques, and barrel samples from some of the valley’s most elite vintners. Thus, Miguel stays up to date on virtually anything of note in Napa Valley winemaking.
With encouragement from fellow winemakers, some of whom lent Miguel production space, Miguel has begun making wines under his own name, beginning with his Miguel Caratachea “Venerable Vines” Cabernet Sauvignon, grown on some of the rarest vines in Napa Valley, over a century old. Even before its first release, it won “American Wine of the Year” and was the top-ranked Cabernet Sauvignon worldwide in the Sommelier Challenge International Wine & Spirits Competition 2023, judged by some of the industry’s most qualified palates, including two Masters of Wine, the world’s highest certification. Miguel’s next wine, his Bracero” Cabernet Sauvignon 2020, repeated the award in 2024.
Miguel sums up his work this way: “After my family, winemaking is my life.”
Miguel lives in St. Helena with his wife and son, who also graduated from St. Helena High School.