No, your GPS isn’t wrong. You’re exactly where you’re supposed to be. You’ve just arrived at Opus One Winery in Napa, California, but as you enter, it feels more like you’ve just arrived in Tuscany. The massive limestone columns on the statuesque 58,000-square-foot property could’ve easily been imported from a Roman villa estate. Open the enormous wooden doors and you’re greeted by an employee at the front desk who is polished and friendly, seems like he genuinely loves his job, and you can feel that. It doesn’t feel intimidating; there are smiles aplenty, and everyone is warm and welcoming.

In this building, one of the most famous wines on planet Earth is made. 12 miles north of Napa, Opus One sits in the heart of Oakville, about a 90-minute drive from San Francisco. Home to the millionaire’s row of the most iconic wineries in the U.S., including Robert Mondavi Winery, Screaming Eagle, and Opus One. If Napa Valley had an all-star game for wine, the starters would all be from Oakville.

If BMW is the ultimate driving machine, Opus One is the wine equivalent. They do one thing, and they do it well; a Bordeaux-style blended wine built primarily around Cabernet Sauvignon. In pop culture, Opus wines are treated like a piece of art just as much as they’re treated like a beverage. In song, you can hear it referenced in Jay-Z lyrics: “winding dirt roads on mopeds, spilling Opus.”

Down the picturesque winding spiral staircase, inside the underground Reserve Library on the bottom floor, sits Meghan Zobeck. Her chair overlooks the Grand Chai, a chilly room with about 1,000 French Oak barrels arranged side-by-side, all containing resting grape juice for the current Opus One blend. She’s clad in her signature bandana, and her deep red hair is eye-catching.

“I love wine,” she says. “You can walk into a room with people you don’t know and if you’re sharing a bottle of wine, you walk out with friends, as cheesy as that might sound. You always have something to talk about if you’re sharing a bottle of wine together.”

And the bandana? She says it’s both the utility and the style- useful in the vineyard but also an extension of her personality. “Life is too short to be boring,” she says.

Meghan is the co-captain of the all-star team at Opus One along with winemaker Michael Silacci, who’s been with the company since 2001. Last year, Meghan was appointed as the first woman to lead winemaking operations at Opus. Among other things, she says she was heavily drawn to working at Opus in large part because of Silacci and his open-minded nature.

“Michael’s been here for 25 years, as has such deep experience in this place, which is pretty special,” she says. “He does a really great job of leaving space for new ideas and innovation.”

Opus One has been around since 1978, founded by Baron Phillippe de Rothschild of Chateau Mouton Rothschild in Bordeaux, who is basically European wine royalty, and the Godfather of Napa Valley wine, Robert Mondavi.

“Opus One has a very established reputation, and it’s fascinating to me that this winery is so open to innovation,” she says. “The fact that we’re motivated to do it I think is a really positive, healthy thing.”

Innovation and community are woven into the fabric of Opus One—values that not only fuel Zobeck's passion for winemaking, but have shaped her journey for years.

Comedy Central’s South Park once dubbed Meghan’s hometown of Greeley, Colorado as “the exact opposite of Hawaii.” Sick burn. About an hour north of Denver, Greeley is known as a working-class agricultural farm town that is also surprisingly the same city where Joseph Phelps, another Napa Valley icon, was raised. Phelps owned the largest construction company in Greeley and built many of the buildings that there exist today.

“My town was a cow town, and growing up I kind of raged against everything,” Zobeck says. “So, I became a vegetarian, and I was listening to rap music when everyone else was listening to country.”

During Zobeck’s high school years, the NFL’s Denver Broncos held their summer training camp in Greeley at the nearby University of Northern Colorado. While still in high school, she earned an internship working for the Broncos, a position that continued through high school and into her early years attending University of Colorado at Boulder.

She enrolled in the pre-med program with the intention of one day becoming a doctor, and also became a student athletic trainer for the collegiate football team. This job, she hoped, would give her exposure to doctors whose brains she could pick while studying. After graduating from UC Boulder, she planned to take a year off to study for her MCAT exam and also continue working for the Broncos. Her boss at the time, noting her stellar work, wanted to keep her with the organization and pitched her a new challenge to entice her to stay full-time. He offered to train her to negotiate player contracts.

Having recently been talked out of continuing with medical school, she found the timing of the opportunity impossible to ignore. “At the time, I didn’t know any other women that were doing it (working within the Broncos organization).”

“And so, I was like yes, actually, I would totally stay for that,” she said.

Soon, Zobeck was rising the ranks of the Denver Broncos front office.

“I loved the team aspect of it, I loved how driven everybody was, I loved that we were competitive together,” she says. “You’re pushing each other to be better in a way that’s so encouraging.”

During her time with the organization, she worked with a litany of high profile coaches—Mike Shanahan, who delivered 2 Super Bowl titles to the Broncos, and during training camps, his son Kyle, who is the current head coach of the San Francisco 49ers. Also, Klint Kubiak, who is the current head coach of the Las Vegas Raiders, and Mike McDaniel, former head coach of the Miami Dolphins.

The grueling work schedule simply came with the job. “Working 100 hour workweeks, weekends, holidays, I didn’t even think twice about it,” she says. “We’re all doing this. I’m like, this is what we do”.

During one offseason, she needed a quick vacation and went to Santa Barbara, California with friends to do some wine tasting. During visits to various wineries, conversations with the winemakers pouring their wines sparked a curiosity she hadn't anticipated.

“I just started asking questions, because I knew nothing about the process of winemaking, though I had a pretty solid science background,” she says.

What also struck her about the winemakers were their diverse backgrounds. “It was fascinating to me that most of them had traveled the world, and some of them were career changers, and I was like, this is really fascinating,” she says.

Upon returning home, she found something of interest in the Denver magazine 5280. “There was an advertisement in the back for a retail shop that also had like a wine component,” she says. “They had winemaking kits but you could also get fresh grapes during harvest, and use their equipment- it was a custom crush facility and they had a list of like every variety of fruit you could get by the state, like Oregon, California, and Colorado. And so, I signed up to get fresh fruit.”

Zobeck would show up to the facility, buy the harvested grapes, and take them home in bins where she would crush the grapes and ferment the juice at home. Needing the proper tools, she bought equipment to mash the grapes and stir the fermenting juice, and she’d bring the juice back to the facility and use the lab to run samples on early versions of her wine.

“I basically had like a mini winery setup in my basement, because I was like I really wanna know how to do this, and they had little classes and stuff too, and fortunately the internet’s a great place to find information,” she says. “So, I bought books, and initially I was just making it in my basement. I was making quite a bit of wine.”

Her new curiosity for winemaking quickly turned into a passion. The innovation excited her, and the community aspect helped make it even more rewarding.

“After 3 years of that, and noticing that all of my friends started getting into wine because of it was really fun,” she says. “People would come over to help me bottle, and we’d just have all these parties, and it was so much fun, and it created community and I loved that.”

By then, her summer routine had become firmly established. Every summer, anytime between the NFL draft and training camp, when Zobeck had time off, she was taking vacations to different wine regions.

“That’s still how I vacation (laughs).”

Due to the organizational structure at the time, Zobeck began realizing that her upward mobility in the Broncos front office may be limited, and before long, she was looking for internships at wineries abroad to follow her new passion.

But when a new opportunity emerged in the front office, she suddenly found herself at a crossroads “I feel like that was the universe being like “do you really want this?” she says.

“It was a hard decision for me because I was one of the only women doing the job, and it was really hard to earn that space and be taken seriously,” she says.  As she recalls that moment, she found herself wrestling with the question: Could she live with never knowing where a career in wine might have led?

“I had always wanted to travel and just experience different cultures and different things,” she says. So, she resigned from her position with the Broncos and set off to Chile for her first wine internship.

“I don’t regret a thing,” she says. “I love the wine industry.”

You don’t need glasses to see that this iteration of winemakers at Opus One are pretty much all female—some tenured as little as XXX years, others as long as XXX years. The aforementioned Michael Silacci is the only male.

“I think its unique, but you’re seeing it more and more,” Zobeck says. “We have a very female dominated team, and we work so well together, and it just makes it really fun. Our communication is incredible, and we build off of each other’s ideas.”

Meghan often plays the role of main character on the winemaking team; more of the attention is usually centered on her. During our photoshoot day at Opus, there was never a moment that felt like there was any odd energy due to Meghan being in the spotlight.

“THERE AREN’T ANY EGOS, which particularly makes everything very enjoyable, but it also encourages you to bring more ideas to the table,” she says. “I think more so than any other winery I’ve ever been to, it’s really a team process, which I think is unique here and it’s also really incredible because everyone has different experiences and brings something different to the table, so it’s really stimulating to make wine as a group. The team aspect is really kind of front and center.”

Opus One is not a cheap wine. Whereas a typical high-end Napa Cabernet sits at an average price of $225 per bottle, recent vintages of Opus One sit at an average price of $440 per bottle, firmly within Napa’s ultra-luxury tier alongside names such as Screaming Eagle, Harlan Estate, Scarecrow, and Bond.

Tastings at Opus One require a reservation beforehand, which can be booked online, and range from $150 for the salon tasting of 3 different wines, to $250 for the longer tasting experience that includes canapés. For the ultimate visit, the ‘Art of the Table’ experience offers a detailed tour, followed by a seasonal 4-course meal, with a Chef-curated wine pairing of different vintages of Opus One, for $793.

For many people, the question comes down to one thing: Is it worth the price? That answer begins in the glass, where the liquid silkiness begins to reveal itself. The answer becomes even clearer when you realize that decades from now, that same bottle is very likely to still be delivering an extraordinary experience.

Most wine is built for the near future, not the long one. Wine educators commonly estimate that 90-95% of all wine is meant to be consumed within 1-5 years, while less than 1% can evolve gracefully for 20+ years. That is part of what makes Opus One different. In a world of bottles made for the moment, Opus One is built for the milestone — the graduation, the wedding, the first home, the occasion that’s still years away but already worth saving for.

Opus One doesn’t cut corners when it comes to wine production. We asked Zobeck to elaborate.

“First, people are a primary focus in everything we do,” she says. “People are put first whether that’s in the vineyard, the winery, guest relations—it’s everywhere in the company. We also run a lot of pretty incredible research trials in the vineyard, and we also share that information with the community, with UC Davis, and with different schools. Our farming practices are regenerative now, and we put a lot of time and effort into the vineyard. We’ve been farming organically since 2011, certified organic since 2020. We don’t cut costs.”

Organic certification prevents winemakers from using synthetic pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. Opus One will also soon be regenerative organic certified, a relatively new wine operations standard that also focuses on worker welfare and social fairness, including a labor practices review.

“It incorporates the human element which I love, because a lot of farming certifications don’t actually have anything having to do with the people that are working in the vineyards, which is kind of wild,” she says. “So instead of you’re not spraying chemicals or you’re not tilling, you’re actually taking care of your people as well. We’re also fully staffed in the cellar, so we’re not overworking the staff, we’re really making sure everyone’s taken care of. Everything we do is with quality in mind, we’re incredibly detail-oriented in the cellar, in the vineyard, and everything we do has a lot of intention.”

At the time of writing Opus One had just bought a new property on Atlas Peak in the nearby Vaca Mountains. “We’re researching the site, investigating the soils, mapping the waterways, mapping the wildlife corridors, so everything we do is kind of above and beyond and we think that also translates to the quality,” she says.

Can Zobeck herself taste the difference between a good wine and a great wine? She thinks so.

“I notice a difference in wines that have responsible farming practices or that are very dedicated to their farming practices vs not, and think you can taste that in the glass, and I think even if you taste blind, you will taste that in the glass,” she says. “It logically makes sense that vines that are better cared for produce better fruit, and then obviously that translates into the wine.”

“To me, when you’re tasting fruit and when you’re tasting wine, it’s kind of the same thing,” she says. “Prior to harvest you’re out there tasting everyday, you’re tasting the grapes, you’re walking through the vineyards. It’s hard to pinpoint but there’s this beautiful, delicate complexity, and then this energy, which is hard to translate into words, but the fruit is like it’s alive, and you wanna capture that, and you know that that’s gonna dance on your palate too.”

“If you can capture that, then it usually creates a wine that kind of feels the same, and to me, a good wine is the one that you smell, you sip, and you’re like ohhhhh,” she says. “And then you’re like, ok I’m gonna sip this slowly because I want to keep coming back to it to enjoy it. But I think all of that starts in the vineyard for sure.”

A lot of media stories these days contain ‘doom and gloom’ news about the wine industry. Since Covid, global wine consumption has fallen nearly 12% to its lowest levels in more than 60 years, according to the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV).

Zobeck is confident about the future of the industry.

“I think there’s natural ebbs and flows and we’re kind of in an ebb right now, and it’s harder when you’re not reading about it and you’re actually experiencing it,” she says. “I think with 2020 being a year where everyone was at home doing a lot of drinking, the industry saw a boom, and then several people increased their business based on a period of time that was temporary. And then it swung back and kind of normalized in the direction that it was before 2020, and that was painful for a lot of people.”

“When I’m in San Francisco I see wine on every table,” she says. “And I know some people have said the opposite but I’m like man, I get out and I travel and I think people are still curious and they’re wanting something that creates conversation and community and wine does such a great job of that. I think we’re in kind of a normalizing phase.”

We asked her what’s a food pairing rule that she completely ignores.

“That it always has to be steak with Cabernet,” she says. “I think there’s some hard and fast safe rules, but I think you miss a lot with wine and food if you only do the same thing every time, so I always like to be experimental with pairings.”

We asked her to give us an example.

“There’s a really great Indian restaurant in San Francisco called Copra, but they do really cool pairings because a lot of people have a really hard time pairing things with a decent amount of spice,” she says. “I was poured a skin contact wine, but not orange, with high acid, and it had a little bit of body and some salty texture. It was dry and amazing. And I was like, this is why we cannot choose the same pairings every time. Their wine list is really great—they do a really great job of showing that you don’t just have to have a sweet Riesling with spicy food every time.”

She also sees a lot of trends in today’s wine culture that she loves. “I love the people that are sharing what they’re learning as they’re learning it, because it brings you in,” she says. “It humanizes it too, and it’s relatable and I love that.”

“I wasn’t really looking at Instagram when I was learning, and there’s so much information on Instagram and other platforms, but just the visual aspects are really nice because it helps with different learning styles because I’m a very visual learner,” she says. “I love non-judgment in wine evaluations, there’s something different for everyone, everyone has something that they’re into and I don’t love the “this is a bad wine, this is a good wine.”

She names Wine Folly as a standout wine resource. “I was looking at Madeline’s books before I got into the wine industry,” she says, referring to Madeline Puckette, one of Wine Folly’s co-founders. “The visuals are so good; she does such a good job of making everything digestible.”

Zobeck acknowledges that she felt a bit overwhelmed when she first discovered wine. “When I first started getting into wine it was intimidating because I felt like oh my gosh, how do you even choose a wine?” she says. “And then you don’t want to ask a dumb question, but now people have access to so much information so they can feel a little more knowledgeable before going to ask for a wine. I do think that the average sommelier has changed as well, so I think the wine community is a little more aware of people feeling intimidated by wine, so they try to be more inclusive.”

“On the other end, I saw someone write this the other day saying, “don’t assume that we don’t know about wine either,” she says. “So, there’s that balance and this is why I always appreciate sommeliers because you have to be a psychologist too. So, I think people are being more aware about bringing people into wine and hopefully that continues but there’s also work to be done.”

As far as advice goes for people aspiring to be in the wine industry, she feels that there’s a great place that most people can start- working at a local wine shop.

“I know winemakers that started in wine shops,” she says. “You get to see a little bit of everything—you get exposure to winemakers because they’ll pop into the shop and do tastings, but you also get exposure to the sales side of things, and you get to try a bunch of different wines which I think is incredible. If you are 100% positive you want to go into the production side of things, then a harvest internship is absolutely the only way. Certainly, you can go to school too, but even if you go to school, you’re still gonna start at an internship. That was some of the best advice I got, is you might as well do the internship and see if you like it first.”

Zobeck says be wary of advice you may get from people along the way in your wine journey. “Don’t be afraid of taking risks and stay open minded,” she says. “I think a lot of people will give you advice based on their own fears. I would just encourage people to not be afraid to get into wine. It’s not as intimidating as it seems when you start getting into it, whether that’s making it or drinking it. Stay curious, stay open minded. And also, vote.”

Zobeck travels often. After our interview, she went to London to taste every wine Opus One has made since its inaugural vintage of 1979, all the way up to 2000- in what’s known as a vertical. So how did the unicorn 1979 Opus taste? “It was so alive, still showing a vibrant red fruit character that you don’t often see in a 47-year-old wine,” she says.

And is there any of the 1979 left? “Yes! Like such a small amount,” she says.

Earlier this year, both the winemaking team and sales teams at Opus traveled to Singapore to teach a masterclass to the Singapore Sommelier Association. About 40 young, bright-eyed sommeliers packed into the class, with the Q&A portion being one of the highlights for Zobeck.

“It was fun for them to have a winemaker that they can ask all their nerdy questions to and ask me the things you’re afraid to ask me,” she says.

Looking across the room at all the very curious sommeliers in the class gave Zobeck a ton of hope for the future of the wine industry. “I don’t think wine is going anywhere at all,” she says. “I’m so confident that wine is going to be in our lives because people need wine like they need community, and food.”

 “And joy.”

TL