The Estate

A single block.
Thirty-seven years later.

SOLERA was planted in 1987 by Marcus and Helena Durán on a sun-facing hillside in Oakville. They came from northern Spain, where the solera method of aging wine — passing each year's character forward into the next — had shaped their understanding of what wine could be.

The name was their first and only brand decision. Everything else — the varieties, the land, the style — took decades to understand. "We planted Cabernet Sauvignon because everyone told us to," Marcus recalled years later. "We kept planting it because the land kept asking us to."

Today SOLERA farms 180 acres across three distinct growing regions. The founding Oakville block remains the estate's heart. The children of the original Durán vines still grow in row seven.

Elena Vásquez

Head Winemaker since 2008

Elena came to SOLERA after seven vintages at Domaine de la Romanée-Conti and four years in the southern Rhône. She brought a Burgundian reverence for transparency — "wine should taste like where it came from, not what was done to it."

Her philosophy at SOLERA is minimum intervention: gentle whole-cluster pressing, native-yeast fermentation where the population is reliable, patient barrel regimes that never overextract, and blending decisions that take months rather than days.

"Every vintage teaches you something the previous one didn't. The vine is always smarter than you. The best thing you can do is stay out of the way."

"The vine is always smarter than you. The best thing you can do is stay out of the way."

The soil is the wine.

Winemakers talk endlessly about terroir. What they mean, at its most essential, is this: the geological structure beneath your vines determines what flavours they produce. No technology overrides it. No winemaking corrects for it. It is given.

At SOLERA, the Oakville benchland sits above a deep profile of volcanic alluvial soils over fractured basalt. Our roots reach down three metres or more, accessing ancient mineral reserves that no irrigation ever touches. That's why the Estate Reserve Cabernet has a graphite character no other valley wine replicates.

At Fort Ross-Seaview, the picture is different: Goldridge sandy loam over fractured Franciscan sandstone. The sand drains quickly — too quickly, some say. We say the vine's struggle is the wine's complexity.