Nichelini Family Winery
AVA · Napa Valley
verified · TTB List of Permittees
Editorial profile
Nichelini Family Winery is the oldest family-owned winery in Napa County, founded by Swiss settlers Anton and Caterina Nichelini, who homesteaded Chiles Valley in 1884 and built the winery's hand-hewn stone cellar by 1895. The property, its original Roman wine press, and the family's stewardship have continued unbroken since; winemaking has passed through five generations, with Aimée Sunseri (5th generation) becoming the winery's seventh head winemaker in 2009.
The estate's mainstays are Cabernet Sauvignon, Zinfandel, Muscadelle (long called Sauvignon Vert on the property) and Petite Sirah, alongside a sparkling wine and Sémillon-based whites. The roster's listed domain, nichelini.com, has no Internet Archive record and appears to be the wrong domain; the winery's real site is nicheliniwinery.com. That live site now blocks automated fetches (Squarespace, rendering its product catalog only after scripts run), so this profile and the wines below are drawn from Internet Archive captures of the producer's earlier, server-rendered e-commerce site (2017) and its history page (2019).
- Winemaker
- Aimée Sunseri
Facts read from web.archive.org
What's on file
Address
2950 SAGE CANYON RD
Where it's registered
Hovering a shaded region names it; a click opens its page.
- Principal2950 SAGE CANYON RD, SAINT HELENA
The ground it sits on
AVA · Napa Valley
6.3
pH, 1:1 water
13.2cm
, whole profile
98cm
to
Well drained
, dominant condition
Distribution across 232 · mean ◆, median │, p10–p90 bar
Dominant
- 14.6%
- 8.9%
- 8.8%
- 8.7%
- 6.5%
232 map units · soil described over 96.5% of the region’s area · 10.8% is water, rock outcrop or other non-soil · 77% of the described area has a restrictive layer within the profile.
Wines
100% Cabernet Sauvignon from vines the family describes as decades old, hand-harvested and cellared in French oak
blend
50% Pinot Grigio, 50% Sauvignon Blanc, bottle-fermented in the traditional method; the winemaker's exploration of what the cooler Chiles Valley District can do for sparkling wine
100% Petite Sirah from the estate's Antoinette Block, nicknamed "High Valley" for its site
100% Zinfandel from vines the family planted in 1929, dry-farmed and low-yielding
100% Sémillon barrel-fermented in new French oak
from a small block planted 69 years earlier, named for the 6th Nichelini child
blend
a Bordeaux-style white blend, roughly 70% Muscadelle and 30% Sémillon, estate-grown
7 of 7 wines link to the page they were read from. The list is what a producer publishes about itself, one citation at a time — it is not a catalog, and a wine missing from it is uncurated rather than unmade.