Clos Pegase Blanc de Noir 2021
Disclaimer: I’ve been a member of the Clos Pegase wine club for years, so this post is hardly impartial.
Clos Pegase was founded by the late Jan Shrem in 1983 on a 50-acre vineyard near Calistoga in Napa Valley. He was born in Colombia in 1930 to Jewish-Lebanese parents, and spent his childhood in Jerusalem and his early adolescence back in Colombia.
A romance with a Japanese woman named Mitsuko led him to Japan, where they were married in 1960. They stayed 13 years, and during that time Shrem established a book distribution company that sold English-language encyclopedias, and books on engineering and art.
After Shrem sold this operation, he moved with his wife and two sons to spend time in Italy and France, where he continued with publishing and book distribution ventures. While there, he began collecting art and learning about wine. He studied enology at the University of Bordeaux.
The Winery
After finally retiring from the publishing business, Shrem returned to the U.S., settling in Napa Valley, where he established Clos Pegase Winery. In cooperation with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, he held an architectural design competition for his new winery’s building. Out of 96 entries the winner was the late Michael Graves. The building opened in 1987, and was designed in the Postmodern style with which Graves was closely associated at the time. Graves described the character of his creation as tending “to evoke memories of a European ancestry” and having a “timeless sensibility.” The selection jury explained, “it embodies a celebration of the lifestyle that is unique to the Napa Valley.”
In the Washington Post in 1988, James Conaway said that “Clos Pegase is our first monument to wine as art.” It was later described by architecture critic Susan Dinkelspiel Cerny as “an interpretation of Classicism in ochre and burnt sienna, with a spare desert feeling.”
The winery has since been painted a rather drab gray, not a particular improvement, I think. As you can see, the original open lawns were replaced in the summer of 2015 with desert vegetation.
This “heritage garden” is a commitment to water conservation and landscape design. The project, in partnership with San Francisco garden design company Flora Grubb Gardens, replaced water-thirsty lawns with a special collection of rare, drought-tolerant plants and trees. The garden is anchored by 19 heritage Jubaea Chilenis “Wine Palms” — the largest West Coast collection north of Santa Barbara.
Shrem sold Clos Pegase to Leslie Rudd’s Vintage Wine Estates in 2013. Texas billionaire Jay Adair, who made his fortune selling auto parts and autos online, purchased Clos Pegase from Vintage Wine Estates in 2024 in a bankruptcy auction. In the same deal, he also acquired Girard, Viansa, B.R. Cohn, and Kunde.
The winemaker
Robin Akhurst has handled the winemaking duties at Clos Pegase since 2016. A native of Scotland, he graduated from the University of Edinburgh with a degree in environmental sciences. Following graduation, he took a job as a sommelier in Edinburgh, then worked in London for one of the city’s independent wine merchants.
Determined to make a life in wine, he moved to New Zealand and received a graduate degree in viticulture and enology from Lincoln University in Christchurch. He worked two harvests in Marlborough before moving on to Burgundy’s famed Domaine Leflaive and Australia’s Two Hands Winery.
A fortunate suggestion from Michael Twelftree of Two Hands led Akhurst to accept a harvest position in Napa valley with Thomas Rivers Brown in 2009, working with the team at Outpost Wines on Howell Mountain. Under Brown’s guidance, he worked on wines from Schrader Cellars, Maybach, and Rivers Marie. Following that harvest, he took a position that lasted four years directing the production team at Envy Wines, a winery and custom-crush project established by partners Nils Venge and Mark Carter.
Clos Pegase Blanc de Noir 2021
This wine is sourced from Mitsuko’s Vineyard, named for Shrem’s late wife, consisting of 365 acres in the Los Carneros appellation within the Napa Valley. Because of the size of this property, there is a wide range of soil types, elevations, slopes, and microclimates.
There is plenty of pop when you open the bottle. The wine is a very pale yellow, so much so that it is almost colorless. It pours a medium mousse, that settles into rather large bubbles. The subtle nose features tropical fruits, especially zesty lemon and glazed orange. There is a tart and lively acidity on the palate, with flavors of lemon and custard. The wine is quite refreshing, something to easily enjoy rather than contemplate. The ABV is 12.5%.
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