Antoine Chaya is a respected presence in the Silicon Valley technology community and serves as senior director of strategic accounts with Oracle Corporation. With a passion for wine, Antoine Chaya has a particular affinity for varieties from Napa Valley, which is renowned for producing some of the very best Cabernet and Bordeaux vintages.
A Smithsonian Magazine article brought focus to the geological reasons for Napa Valley’s preeminence as a $50 Billion wine region. Situated at the San Francisco Bay’s northern end, Napa Valley is bound by the Mayacamas Mountains in the west and the Vaca Mountains in the east. Its position is within a “transform fault zone,” or a region where tectonic plates slide past one another.
The plates currently involved in this process are the North American and Pacific plates, while the mineral-rich basaltic volcanic soils of Napa Valley are a remnant of the Farallon plate. This plate now lies under the Pacific Ocean and subducted under the North American plate, in what is now California, 30 million years ago. This intensive process led to some material from the plate, which was driven into the earth’s mantle, being scraped and deposited upward on the earth’s surface.
These forces deposited a plethora of minerals found in Northern California soils, at the same time resulting in an earthquake-prone environment crisscrossed with fault lines. From this perspective, it is the region’s very vulnerability to earthquakes that has made possible the creation of its premier wine varieties.
A Smithsonian Magazine article brought focus to the geological reasons for Napa Valley’s preeminence as a $50 Billion wine region. Situated at the San Francisco Bay’s northern end, Napa Valley is bound by the Mayacamas Mountains in the west and the Vaca Mountains in the east. Its position is within a “transform fault zone,” or a region where tectonic plates slide past one another.
The plates currently involved in this process are the North American and Pacific plates, while the mineral-rich basaltic volcanic soils of Napa Valley are a remnant of the Farallon plate. This plate now lies under the Pacific Ocean and subducted under the North American plate, in what is now California, 30 million years ago. This intensive process led to some material from the plate, which was driven into the earth’s mantle, being scraped and deposited upward on the earth’s surface.
These forces deposited a plethora of minerals found in Northern California soils, at the same time resulting in an earthquake-prone environment crisscrossed with fault lines. From this perspective, it is the region’s very vulnerability to earthquakes that has made possible the creation of its premier wine varieties.