Favia Wines

Favia Wines is a husband-and-wife project that represents one of the most talented winemaking partnerships in Napa Valley. Andy Erickson, whose resume includes winemaking roles at Screaming Eagle, Dalle Valle, and Staglin, and Annie Favia, a viticulturist who has managed some of the valley's most prestigious vineyards, founded their personal label in 2003 as a way to apply their combined expertise to wines they make entirely for themselves. The project is tiny, producing roughly 1,000 cases per year, and the wines reflect the couple's deep knowledge of both grape growing and winemaking.

The estate includes a 5-acre vineyard in Coombsville that the couple planted themselves, designed to Annie's viticultural specifications. The Coombsville site, with its volcanic soils and cool microclimate influenced by proximity to San Pablo Bay, produces fruit of elegance and mineral complexity. The couple also sources small amounts of fruit from other exceptional sites across the valley, selecting parcels that offer specific characteristics they want to explore.

Andy Erickson makes the wines with a minimalist approach that reflects his experience at some of Napa's most revered estates. The Cabernet Sauvignon is structured and refined, showing the kind of precision that comes from a winemaker who has worked with the best fruit in the valley for decades. The Cabernet Franc, a variety that Andy has championed throughout his career, is aromatic and complex. The red blends, which shift in composition from vintage to vintage, reveal the couple's curiosity and willingness to follow the wine wherever it leads.

Tastings of Favia wines are available through the mailing list and by appointment at the Coombsville estate. The experience is intensely personal, often with Andy and Annie hosting visitors themselves. The conversation tends toward the philosophical, touching on the relationship between viticulture and winemaking, the meaning of terroir, and the creative tension between intervention and restraint. For visitors who have tasted at the famous estates where Andy has worked, tasting Favia reveals what he makes when he answers only to himself and his wife.

Favia matters because it represents the purest expression of what two exceptionally talented wine professionals create when they have no constraints, no investors, and no brand to maintain. The wines are the unfiltered voice of a couple who have spent their careers perfecting the art and science of Napa Valley winemaking, and who produce their own wine with the freedom and intimacy that their day jobs at larger estates do not always allow.