Our RARECAT Office is located at the Grey Barn in Saint. Helena. Our office is not open to the public. Please contact us for an appointment.

Our tasting room is by appointment located in Calistoga. Please request a tasting.

RARECAT's mailing address is PO Box 801, Rutherford, CA 94573.

By email. Every email will be read and answered by a living, breathing, wine obsessed human. Email us at info@rarecatwines.com.

RARECAT is a boutique, woman-owned Napa winery producing ultra-premium wines across four world-class regions - Napa Valley, Champagne, Bordeaux, and Russian River. It is the only winery making wine in all four, and every bottle is sold the same way: direct from the winery, to a community of clients who are known personally. RARECAT does not distribute, does not sell on shelves, and does not chase scale. The wines are made by hand, without additives, in the tradition of the French wine education that shaped the winemaker and with the free-spirited California perspective that is her birthright.

RARECAT exists to use wine to impact positive change. Behind that simple sentence is a real belief: that wine is one of the few things that reliably brings people together, for conversation, for community, for marking the ordinary days that turn out to matter most. Making elegant, balanced, complex wine is how RARECAT makes that belief tangible, and giving to women, to young professionals, to hundreds of charities, is how it makes it count.

A rare cat is a woman of such beauty that she is, quite simply, a rarity. The name carries the same idea over to the wine: a superb wine flirts. It tempts the nose and the palate, reveals itself slowly, and ultimately seduces you with its beauty. RARECAT wines are meant to behave exactly that way — to draw you back to the glass again and again.

Found at 3:30 in the morrning.

The hardest part of starting a winery, it turns out, is finding a name, because everything is already taken. After numerous searches and four failed attempts, Sharon found RARECAT at 3:30 in the morning. The instant she heard it, she knew. The brand has been written one way ever since: RARECAT, always in capitals — never Rarecat, RareCat, or Rare Cat. The flagship program is written Virgil by RARECAT, and the legal trade name, used in formal and legal contexts, is RARECAT Wines.

Why a seal?

Sharon has always loved wax seals, and collects antique eighteenth-century English fobs. A seal once stood for a family’s word — its honor, its heritage — and every bottle of RARECAT carries that same promise of quality. So when the winery began, she went looking for a seal of its own: something with a sense of place and purpose already baked into it.

What it shows.

The seal is drawn from a Carthaginian coin that dates to roughly 320 to 300 BC. One side bears the portrait of a woman in an oriental tiara, historically identified as the goddess Tanit, patroness of Carthage; in the RARECAT story she is honored alongside Queen Dido, the founder of Carthage in 814 BC, famed for her beauty and intelligence. Either way, the face on the coin is the first RARECAT — a woman of beauty, intelligence, and consequence. The other side shows a lion before a palm tree. The lion honors the mountain lions that still prowl the Old Toll property in Napa; the palm honors Eight Palms, one of Sharon’s homes, named for its eight palm trees.

The coincidences that make it matter.

The coin was chosen in 2008, long before anyone knew what it would come to mean. Carthage produced the one ancient agricultural text the Romans chose not to destroy, written around 350 BC by Mago, the father of viticulture, whose single most important instruction was to plant a vineyard facing north. The Virgil Rock Vineyard on Spring Mountain faces due north, exactly as Mago advised, which is the source of the wine’s freshness and ripeness. The vineyard is named for the Roman poet Virgil, whose Aeneid opens with a shipwreck on the shores of Carthage and a love affair with Queen Dido — the very queen on the coin. A carved rock at the vineyard even quotes Virgil, and that quote traces back to Mago. If you believe there is no such thing as coincidence, then Virgil by RARECAT was always destined.

The coin as a gift.

Today the coin is also a physical object. Bronze coins are bestowed on members of the Virgil Circle, and each one represents a single gifted bottle of Virgil by RARECAT — to be given as the member sees fit, to inspire, to recognize, to donate, or simply to bring people together. Over seven years, in partnership with its members, RARECAT intends to gift ten thousand bottles this way.

To make elegant, balanced wines from four world-class regions.

Old World rigor, California spirit

Elegance, complexity, and balance are the cornerstones of every wine RARECAT makes. That sensibility comes from an unusual training. The winemaker and owner, Sharon Kazan Harris, graduated with honors from the famed D.U.A.D. program — the Diplôme Universitaire d’Aptitude à la Dégustation des Vins — at the Université de Bordeaux, studying entirely in French. She is also California-born, and that free-spirited perspective runs through everything she makes. The RARECAT style lives in the tension between the two: Old World structure meeting New World energy.

RARECAT makes real, honest wines without additives, and it bottles only by vintage. If a wine does not meet the standard in a given year, it is not bottled at all. That is a promise made to every client, and it is kept. The scale is deliberately small, the kind of micro-production where a single hillside Cabernet might amount to fewer than two hundred cases.