Brown meringue using a kitchen torch, holding torch 1 to 2 inches from pie and moving torch back and forth.

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..

Inside Melka Estates in St. Helena, California.. Adrian Gregorutti for Melka Estates.

"'Baby fat,' if you wish, is what the California weather can give you," Melka told me.We have to be tight and nimble because as we have evolved and grown as an organization, we've focused a lot on doing less [and doing it] better.

Whereas when I first started, it was like, let's do everything with everyone and let's show up at every event and let's talk to every shop and let's do everything.I realized over time after saying yes to everything that not everything has an equivalent effort.

How much effort you put into something vs. how much value you get from it.It's not always proportional.