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CASA PIENA
Carmen Policy’s earliest memories of wine, growing up in Youngstown, Ohio were being
given a jelly jar sized glass of it on Sunday dinners with his large Italian family. His grandfather
had been a home winemaker, making wine in old barrels in their cellar from fruit bought
straight off the railroad boxcars coming to Ohio from California. During his time working for
the San Francisco 49ers in the 80’s and 90’s, he and his wife Gail fell in love with the Napa
Valley, traveling there often and in 2001 purchased a 14 acre site near Kapcsandy’s State
Lane vineyard in Yountville. In 2003, he hired Jim Barbour to replant and manage the vineyard
(a former source for Mondavi) and Thomas Brown to craft the Cabernet coming off it.
Casa Piena, or full house, produced their first wine with the 2006 vintage making 650 cases
of top-tier Cabernet. Today, while the vineyard has been sold to Pulido-Walker and the
Policys have moved their home to St. Helena, they still contract 7-10 tons of Cabernet from
their choice block on the Policy Vineyard to produce 500 cases of exquisite wine annually.
