Unless you live up there, getting anywhere on Howell Mountain is a journey. Getting to Outpost Winery is an adventure. Google Maps tells me the 36-mile trip from my place will take over an hour. It “may include unpaved roads.” GPS doesn’t calculate extra time for navigating dense fog and dodging wild animals. I arrive half an hour late. Frank Dotzler, the General Manager of Outpost Wines, is waiting patiently for me in the parking area.

While I’ve tasted Outpost many times with Frank, it has always been at consultant winemaker Thomas Brown’s more accessible Mending Wall Winery. Remote though it may be, seeing the Howard Backen designed Outpost Winery is worth the trek. And the mountain-top vineyard, well, that’s a Cabernet fanatic’s wish come true.

“This was part of the Ferazzi Ranch in the 1800s,” says Frank as we check out a steep slope of new plantings behind the winery. “The original nine acres of vineyard was planted to Zinfandel. Then prohibition happened.” 

Ferazzi Ranch was first planted to vines in the 1860s. Back then, it was a field blend of Zinfandel, Petite Sirah, Carignan, and Alicante Bouschet. In the early 1970s, around 25 acres of the property was bought by Bob Lamborn.

“Bob was one of the pioneers on Howell Mountain,” says Frank. “This vineyard had not been farmed in many years, and he tried to resurrect it but was unable to. He replanted it in the mid-70s to Zinfandel—about 9 acres, Wente clone on AXR rootstock. He built a small winery, a garage really, and a home, and started the Lamborn Family label. My understanding is that Mike Beatty of Beatty Vineyard, who had just purchased a piece of land not too far away, helped him plant the parcel.” 

In 1998, Juli and Terry Pringle purchased the property from Bob Lamborn.

“The Pringles, who had no previous wine experience, moved here from LA after selling their business,” Frank continues. “Larry Turley has a vineyard just up the road called Rattlesnake Ridge. Ehren Jordan and his assistant at the time, Thomas Brown, would drive by on their way up to Rattlesnake and always coveted the vineyard, which was over twenty years old then. They stopped by, spoke to the new owners and shortly after worked out a deal where Turley would buy the majority of the fruit for the Turley label. It was bottled under Turley as ‘Pringle Family Vineyard’ from 1998 to 2002. They would also make a few hundred cases at the Turley winery for the Pringles because the winery was not in working condition at that point.”

Thus, Ehren Jordan and his asstant Thomas Brown made the first vintages of what would become "Outpost" at Turley, while the Pringles got their small winery into working order. 

“The story of the name is interesting,” Frank recalls. “Originally, the Pringles were going to call the wine ‘Howell Owl.’ Prior to bottling the wine, they started tasting a few friends and acquaintances on the wine in barrel, one of them being a bartender at Bistro Jeanty in Yountville. As they were leaving Bistro Jeanty one evening after dinner, the bartender wished them goodnight and said, ‘Have a safe drive up to your outpost.’ Howell Owl was shelved, and Outpost officially became the name of their new label, thank goodness.”

When the Pringles purchased the vineyard, the vines were already showing signs of phylloxera, and they had to replant. They got together with their neighbors, the Dunns, to purchase a parcel between Outpost and Dunn Vineyards and then divided it with the Dunns. This enabled them to plant more vineyards, additional Zinfandel, and a small parcel of Grenache.

“We still have that parcel of Grenache today, as well as almost three acres of what was Petite Sirah, which is now Cabernet Sauvignon,” says Frank. “Their wine program stayed small with most of the fruit going to Turley.”

Frank and his wife Kathy would come buy Outpost from the Pringles in the early 2000s, but it wouldn’t be their first vineyard purchase.

In the early 1950s, Frank Dotzler’s parents immigrated from Germany to Chicago, where he was born and raised. He went to college in New York. Shortly after he graduated, Frank developed a taste for wine.

“Back then, I didn’t have any money, so buying expensive bottles of wine wasn’t possible,” Frank remembers. “I had to find my way in the wine world on a tight budget. I was very fortunate that Illinois was one of the only states in which it was legal to auction wine. I went to every preauction tasting that I could, sometimes two on a Saturday. I would taste wines that were totally out of my price range and wine landscape, but it gave me an amazing education about wines of the world. “

After college, Frank worked for a small business focusing on mechanical engineering, in which his father was a partner.

“In 1990, one of my father’s partners’ sons and I purchased the business from our fathers and the other partners,” Frank explains. “We transformed the business into a full manufacturing company, opening plants in other parts of the US, Europe, and Asia. Our main business was designing, industrializing, and manufacturing PCs. We were very fortunate to live in the time that we did. The business grew very, very quickly.”

During this time, Frank’s passion for wine also grew.

“I started spending every vacation going to a different wine region,” he says. “In the mid-’90s, I was sitting at a winery in Tuscany and, in a drunken moment, looked out over the vineyard and thought, it would be really amazing to own a vineyard. Once I sobered up, I realized that although it was a fun thought, I really knew nothing about Italy, vineyards, or winemaking. But a few months later, I was in Napa and had the same thought while having a glass of wine at Auberge, looking out at the valley. I did what a lot of people do and looked in the windows of the real estate offices in St Helena and wrote down the names of properties and agents. When I got back to Chicago, I called them all, but not one of them called me back. A week or two later, I was ordering some wine from St Helena Wine Center. I told the person I was friendly with there the story, and he said, ‘You need to talk to Ren and Jean at Phillips & Harris Land Brokers.’ Ren (from Paradigm Winery) and Jean (from Screaming Eagle) spent the better part of a year showing me everything on the market and anything coming up. Finally, in 1997, Ren took me up to what is now the True Vineyard. We walked around, and he very plainly said, ‘You should buy this one if you can.’ So, I did.” 

Meanwhile, by the end of the 1990s, Frank’s day job was doing very well. Tremendous growth and the necessity to continually expand convinced Frank and his partner to merge with a multinational public company. At that time, he was spending more than half his time traveling. So, when his son was born, he began looking to start another chapter that didn’t necessitate being away. Frank sold his business in 2000.

“After selling, I worked for the company that we merged with, which was a multibillion-dollar public company,” recalls Frank. “Although I loved what I did and the people I worked with, I wasn’t cut out to work in such a large organization. I had to figure out what I was going to do with the rest of my life. And although scary, I took a leap of faith and decided to move to Napa part-time to figure out how we could go about making wine.”

That parcel of vineyard land he’d purchased up on Howell Mountain soon became Frank’s next chapter.

“Ren and Jean continued to help me with everything—permitting, rootstock, clonal material, vineyard management,” says Frank. “After being delayed with permitting and lots of rock removal and dynamite, we planted it in 2002. The name True Vineyard came from a Bob Dylan song Forever Young. I used to play it for my son when he was an infant. There is a line in the song that ends with ‘...may your wishes all come true.’”

After the vineyard was planted, it would be a few years before those vines would come online, which was okay since Frank still had no place to make the wine.

“We looked at putting a winery on the True property, but it would have impacted the vineyard,” says Frank. “So that idea was scrapped, and we started looking for another property to add additional acreage and a winery or an area to build one. I had remained friends with Ren Harris and mentioned my thoughts to him. I knew that he and Jean were out of the real estate business and now focused on their wine programs, but I hoped he had some leads. He said that he was out of the loop. So, I spent a good part of my time off in 2002—I was still working—looking for another property...but found none.”

Then, in early 2003, Frank was sitting at his desk in Chicago, and a call came through from Ren. 

“Ren asked me if I was still looking for a winery and more land,” Frank grins. “I said ‘yes.’ He said he had dinner with some people who may be putting their property with a vineyard and a winery on the market. Then he went on to say that he told them that if he could sell their property with one phone call, he and Jean would get back into the real estate business to facilitate the sale. The call that he had made to me was that ‘one phone call.’ The next day, after getting it okayed by the Pringles, he called me with the details about Outpost. I flew out the next morning. From the moment I stepped onto the property, my thoughts were not if we would buy this but how we could get it done. I was overwhelmed by its beauty and excited about its potential. And it was exactly what we needed to make wines from the True Vineyard. It was less than a mile away! I had always thought that it would take us a number of years to get into the wine business, but now it is going to happen in a few months.”

Frank and his wife Kathy purchased Outpost in 2003. Soon after, they set about building a new winery.

“We demolished the old winery at the beginning of 2005 and built the new winery that year, with the input from Thomas Brown on the production side and Howard Backen as the architect,” Frank says. “The new winery allowed us to do tours and tastings and to build a mailing list. Also, in 2004 I planted two additional blocks (3 acres total) of Cabernet Sauvignon. I also put a plan together to replace the old Zinfandel vineyard, which had phylloxera, mostly with Cabernet Sauvignon, and keep about half of the Zinfandel acreage after replanting.”

A little more than a decade later, in 2018, AXA Millésimes, a subsidiary of one of France’s largest insurance companies and owner of a collection of high-quality wineries around the world, including Château Pichon Baron and Suduiraut in Bordeaux, made the Dotzlers an offer they couldn’t refuse.

“When I first met Christian Seely (Managing Director of AXA Millésimes), he said that AXA wanted to make Outpost a part of the group but also leave us to work autonomously,” Frank tells me. “Christian hoped to find a property that complemented what they were doing in Bordeaux—making a world-class Cabernet Sauvignon-based wine from a great terroir. This is what he saw in Outpost. He said that these investments were ‘100 year’ investments for AXA. The focus was to keep making the best possible wines we could off the property and continue striving to improve them. He said that they would in no way try to take advantage of the brand goodwill to increase production but that if we could find vineyards that were ‘A++’ that would add to the program, they would be interested. The management, hospitality, and winemaking teams are virtually the same as prior to the sale.”

Today, Frank is the General Manager of Outpost.

"I’m doing mostly the same thing that I did when I owned it," he smiles. 

When AXA purchased Outpost in 2018, they accelerated the replanting program, accomplishing in one year what Frank confesses would have taken him many. In 2021, AXA purchased a 16-acre vineyard located between the Outpost property and the True Vineyard. In 2022, this vineyard was planted to Cabernet Sauvignon (90%), Merlot (5%), and Cabernet Franc (5%). Meanwhile, Outpost’s winery has been refitted with new state-of-the-art equipment, including a new optical sorter, automatic pump-over devices, and new lab equipment.

“Christian has lived up to every promise he made and more,” says Frank. “And a very fortunate change that came along with the sale is that we are now plugged into a much bigger global network for sales and marketing as well as winemaking.”

Having all your wishes come true is great, but it’s even better when they stay true.