the old port city of Mobile.

1995 was a watershed moment in their timeline.It's the year when Philippe and Cherie formed Melka Consulting and began offering their winemaking services.

Their first clients were Lail Vineyards, Seavey Vineyard, and Constant Diamond Mountain.A year later, in 1996, the couple decided to make their own wines and introduced the Melka Wines label.. Fast-forward to the here and now, and any mention of the Melka name is often preceded by some iteration of "100-point winemaker," but the details of Philippe Melka's meteoric rise in winemaking fame should not be relegated to the pages of a handful of critics' notebooks.His 100-point scores do seem to trail him like a Grateful Dead fan club, and at this stage, he couldn't tell you how many perfect scores he's achieved..

The first 100-pointer came in 2009 for a 2007 Dana Estates Lotus Vineyard Cabernet.But points aside, next to Napa's other historical French figures like André Tchelistcheff of Beaulieu Vineyards fame, and the flying French winemaker Michel Rolland, or the Virginia-born Thomas Rivers Brown, much of the Cabernet Sauvignon style inhabiting bottles today is the result of other Napa winemakers aiming to craft their own Melka lookalikes..

It's a style that yields to a glass-staining, unabashedly bold, rich, intoxicating, heady, and sumptuous mouth-filling red—which always, always, bends around whatever is on your plate.

Most of his creations are intended for cellaring—to shed their baby fat and develop more nuanced complexities..It feels like we have two companies within the same organization because you have two totally different customers.

It's something that I feel very strongly about never losing because it's the chefs who built our whole world.They're our community.

Chefs do not mess around with fricking quality.They don't give a damn who you are, if you don't have good quality, you're f'ed.