Winemaker Q & A: Dan Petroski of Massican
Meet this terrific Cali winemaker & hear about his dream dinner party!
Hello! If you are just picking up the Grape to Table newsletter, thanks so much for joining to learn more about wine, food, and life. It’s been a FULL YEAR of the newsletter (yahoo)! If you are interested you can read my origin story (click here to read), or just dive straight into fun content focused on meaningful time at the table with delicious wine and food. For now, my newsletter is free and you can find all the content by clicking here – basically a little Grape to Table website created by the great folks at Substack. As always I really appreciate when you hit the like button as it helps get this newsletter in front of more people :) Now onto this week’s content: my first Q & A! I have been promising to start including some Q & As with wine industry folks to make this not just about me (thank goodness) and to take me back to my journalism roots. First up is Dan Petroski, founder and winemaker at Massican Wines. As always I certainly appreciate it if you hit the like button as this helps more folks find my humble little newsletter and hopefully spread some simple joy.
I first met Dan Petroski about ten years ago when his wines arrived in our market here in Charleston, South Carolina. This was after selling my own restaurant and in the midst of diving headfirst into wine for me. So when I heard of a dinner at Kiawah Island’s Ocean Room featuring this newer California winemaker and an all white wine lineup I was intrigued. What could this be?
That one wine dinner led to a terrific friendship with Dan and many collaborations over the years as I went on to open a wine shop/bar (RIP Edmund’s Oast Exchange). I loved Dan’s wines from the get-go thanks to their supreme drinkability and unique nature (esoteric Italian white grapes – yes please!). But our friendship really stemmed from Dan’s down to earth, fun loving nature. He has always been an email away with any question I might have regarding his wine obviously, but also with any and all nerdy wine questions! I featured him a few times on my old blog, and so I thought it was only fitting to kick-off my Q & A series on Substack with Dan! So without further ado, please let me introduce you to Dan Petroski and Massican Wines!
Give us the short version on how you ended up working in wine and owning a winery.
After working in magazine publishing for ten years, I decided to take a break and travel to Sicily, where I interned at Valle dell'Acate winery. What was meant to be a temporary escape turned into a passion for winemaking. In 2006, I moved to Sonoma County for harvest and ended up staying, eventually becoming the winemaker at Larkmead in Napa Valley. During my tenure at Larkmead, I founded Massican in 2009, focusing on white wines inspired by my time living in Italy.
(Note: Massican is named after Monte Massico, a mountain range in the Campania region of Italy. Dan's great-grandparents were born in this area.)
And as a follow up was wine part of your life growing up?
Not particularly. Growing up in a working-class Brooklyn household, wine wasn’t a significant part of our daily life. My appreciation for wine developed later in life, mainly through my work in publishing when I had the good fortune to explore the restaurant scene in New York City as part of my sales and marketing jobs.
How about food? Did your family spend a lot of time cooking? Or eating out?
Food was a central part of my upbringing. As a family, we had to be at the dinner table at 6 p.m. every night. My Italian grandmother would begin meal prep every night, and my mother would finish the meal when she got home from work. Most of our meals were simple staples of the 1980s. However, it was the weekends, birthdays, and holidays when we leaned into our Italian-American roots and had multi-course meals made from 24-hour red sauces, cheese-filled pasta, lasagnas, and parmigiana. We rarely ate out, maybe once or twice yearly – around Christmas or a significant school event, such as graduation.
Fast forward to the present. Give us your elevator pitch explaining Massican. Of course, I expect this to tackle the elephant in the room – that Massican is focused on all white wines but exists in red wine country.
Massican is Napa Valley’s only winery dedicated exclusively to white wines. Inspired by the fresh, vibrant whites of the Mediterranean, particularly Italy, Massican blends tradition with innovation to produce wines that are crisp, refreshing, and full of energy. In a region renowned for its red wines, Massican stands out by offering a unique portfolio that challenges the status quo and celebrates the diversity of white wine.
You have been through some changes over the past few years – namely leaving your day job at a big-ish Napa winery (Larkmead) to focus on your own winery (Massican) and then joining forces with Gallo in 2023. How have all these changes helped you better realize your ultimate goals for Massican?
Leaving Larkmead allowed me to fully dedicate myself to Massican and pursue my vision without compromise. Partnering with Gallo in 2023 provided the resources and support needed to expand our production, expand our reach, and invest in making Massican wines more affordable and, therefore, more accessible to everyday wine drinkers. These changes have enabled me to focus on quality and will ensure that Massican continues to grow and thrive.
Last time we talked you mentioned a desire and need to focus on regenerative agriculture in order to protect the earth and future of winemaking in general – is that still a goal?
I wouldn’t mind taking a step back and presenting a broader view of my beliefs and those of many of my peers in California wine country regarding the environmental pressures we face daily in the fields. I am committed to farming and business practices that enhance biodiversity, improve soil health, and reduce our carbon footprint. This approach ensures the longevity of our vineyards and contributes to the overall health of our environment.
(Note: Dan holds a seat on the Board of the Directors of the Napa Valley Grapegrowers, where he chairs the Viticulture and Environmental Stewardship Committee, and he also holds a seat on the Board of Napa Green, Napa Valley’s third-party environmental certification program for wineries and vineyards.)
Another passion of yours outside of grape growing and winemaking is writing/journalism/and just generally being creative. Before wine you worked in publishing and have managed to continue to make that a part of your life via a virtual magazine that has evolved into a very well developed Substack newsletter (written by journalist Jordan Mackay) – tell us a bit about all these things!
My background in publishing has always fueled my creative side. I continue to explore this passion, thinking about Massican as an editorial product, with wine as the vessel that carries the conversation. Every day for the last five years, I have asked myself, where do you want a glass of wine today? Specifically, where do you want to have a glass of Massican today? With that in mind, it allows me to think like a wine drinker, not a winemaker. And the answer usually lies in very many spectacular places – at a restaurant, in an art gallery, in the park, reading a book, on vacation, at the opera, on the couch streaming Netflix, at the kitchen counter while I am cooking a meal, at the table when we are eating that meal. There is so much editorial around what you can do while having a glass of wine, so we allow words to take us there.
(Note: Yes, there are plans to turn the Substack newsletter into an actual physical cookbook – hooray!)
Also tied into your journalism/creative roots – tell us a bit about your hunt for your very own shade of blue to define the Massican brand.
The search for the perfect shade of blue was about finding a color that reflected the essence of Massican – the Mediterranean sky and sea. This specific hue embodies the freshness and vibrancy of our wines, creating a visual identity that resonates with our brand’s spirit and the coastal inspirations behind our wines and where my great grandparents grew up – in Campania, outside of Naples. Our Massican blue is a color that we saw on a 1,600-year-old fresco outside of Pompeii. A Fresco my great-grandparents likely had seen in their lifetime as well.
(Note: Click here for an article that dives even deeper into Dan’s search for that blue.)
Let’s wrap up our chat with some daydreaming and discuss what would be your dream wine dinner/dinner party… What would the location be? Who would you invite? Can be anyone – even those no longer with us! (But let’s limit it to 4 to keep things under control, lol.). Massican wines or some from friends? And of course the food…give us all the details…and would you cook yourself or bring in a guest chef (can be anyone)! And finally a playlist?
During the pandemic, we had a wonderful “pod” of four Napa locals who gathered at our house every Thursday for a martini. Those martinis tended to fade into dinner outside under the setting sun, alongside wine and great conversation. Jordan Mackay, the writer and author of the Massican cookbook (which currently exists as a Substack newsletter), was at the table each week, and he will always have a seat at my dream dinner party. And that dream is to bring the Pod together somewhere in Europe, maybe Sicily or the South of France. This dream would be like when M.F.K. Fisher, Julia Child, and Richard Olney gathered in Provence 1970 for many wine-fueled dinner parties. We would cook for ourselves as we often did during birthdays and special occasions during the pandemic. So we would spend a night or two drinking and plotting the menu before shopping at the local farmers’ markets. And the wine will be unique, not because of name or value, but because each bottle will have a meaningful story we can share. The one thing we would lean on for Massican would be our playlists; there are over 30 hours across many genres of music that we can tune in and out of.
P.S. Don’t forget to give us the details on easiest ways to purchase your wine and if you offer tasting visits?
Sadly, Massican does not offer official tastings at this time, but if you reach out to me, dan@massican.com, and I am in town and available during your visit, I will do my best to set up a private tasting. Massican wines can be purchased online on our website: www.massican.com.
Massican is also expanding production and distribution and can and will be closer to your home. Contact us (hello@massican.com), and we will do our best to find the retailer nearest your home.
Feel free to follow us on Instagram (@massicanwinery), check out our Italian cookbook and pantry on Substack by clicking here (https://massican.substack.com/), and our Spotify playlists by clicking here.
P.S. I would be remiss not to mention that Dan’s Annia wine (a white blend inspired by Friuli, Italy) is one of my all time favorite comfort wines (it’s just so happy) and goes great with the curried chicken dish of my childhood – Country Captain – that I featured on the newsletter last summer. Click here for that post and recipe.