If You Think This Cabernet Sauvignon Hits Different, Wait Until You Meet The Winemaker

“The Lebanese culture that I grew up with is very generous. Hospitality and generosity are very much part of our identity,” says Daniel Daou, chief winemaker and cofounder of Daou Vineyards in Paso Robles, California. “You can go to Lebanon and you walk on the street and meet somebody, and two minutes later, they invite you to the house and treat you for dinner. I want to feel that, when I make the wines — that they are generous.”

Daou is everything you’d imagine a successful wine wizard to be: personable, passionate and incredibly informed about the nuances of high-quality wine. Charmingly nerdy about the process, he explains the soil sorcery and climate specifics required to create a cabernet sauvignon that tastes clean, mildly fruity and just complex enough. In short, it’s a lot of science sprinkled with a little bit of magic.

He is also not necessarily who you’d imagine if you know who the American wine industry is composed of. Daou was not born into this world; he fell into it, one taste at a time.

Daniel Daou and his brother and partner in wine, Georges, were born in Beirut. After a rocket attack on their home during a raging civil war, their family fled to France to start over. That’s where their wine curiosity began. Daou reminisces about tasting from a bottle of cheval blanc as a young teen that his father had gotten “a great deal” on. “I still can taste the wine, which is crazy,” he says. “I have this thing where if I drink a great wine, I never forget it. I can remember the taste 20, 30, even 40 years later.”

Though Daou fell swiftly in love with wine, he never imagined he’d get to be part of the creative process of winemaking. As so many immigrant stories go, he came to the States at 18 to study something