Ankh Wines

About Ankh Wines

Founded in 2007, Ankh Wines is an award-winning producer of Napa Valley cabernet sauvignon and merlot-based red wine blends. Enthusiastic and unrelenting in our pursuit for quality, we follow these four guiding principles:

Focus

We produce only red wines, focusing primarily on cabernet sauvignon and merlot. Anything more would dilute our attention.

Value

We believe that world-class Napa Valley red wines should be attainable, and we work hard to ensure that both our Ankh cabernet and El Nil red blend deliver real value. The market would say we could charge a lot more, but that's not who we are.

Balance

Wine shouldn’t need to be overpowering to be delicious. But it takes great patience to deliver wine that is nuanced and balanced. To achieve this, we age our wines in French oak for up to 24 months, and then hold them another two years after bottling before releasing them for sale.

Scarcity

We think that quantity is the nemesis of quality, and that by keeping our production extremely limited, we can focus on the little things that make great wines great. Every year, we produce fewer than 250 cases across all of our offerings.

In Egyptian mythology, Sekhmet was a fierce and violent warrior goddess. The sun god Ra had become angry because mankind was not following his laws, so he sent Sekhmet to destroy the people. The fields ran with blood, but the sight of the carnage caused Ra to repent. He ordered Sekhmet to stop, but she was in a blood lust and would not listen. So Ra tricked her by pouring jugs of wine in her path. She gorged on what she thought was blood and became so drunk that she slept for days. When she awoke, Sekhmet had transformed into the benevolent goddess Hathor; her blood lust had disappeared, and humanity was saved.

Every year in what is now the month of August, Egyptians held a great festival to celebrate the Drunkenness of Hathor. This massive event was the largest of its day, and coincided with the start of Akhet season - when the Nile River would begin to rise. Tens of thousands of people from all across Egypt traveled to this great event. Today, we honor the saving of mankind by releasing a new vintage of Ankh during the Akhet season, and by placing an icon representing Hathor on every bottle.

While the ankh represented eternal life in the spiritual context, the Nile River was the literal life force of ancient Egypt. Every year over the summer and early fall, the river would slowly rise, and a three month-long inundation would flood the plains and Nile River delta. This flood season was the most celebrated and important natural event in all of ancient Egypt, with the annual inundation called AKHET. Then, from late fall through the spring, the floods would recede revealing the silt and fertile soils that Egyptians would plant their crops on. This second season was called PERET. The final season, called SHEMU, literally translates to mean “low water”. It was during this time that Egyptians raced to prepare for the next Akhet, harvesting crops and rebuilding irrigation canals and structures destroyed by the last season’s floods.