“If we were struggling, it would be a problem,” he said. “It’s a luxury to be able to do that without financial pressure.”

For Mr. McCoy, the leap from sommelier to wine executive has required some fast learning. He had gotten to know Mr. Lawrence at the Little Nell, where he had been a regular guest, and when Mr. Lawrence was considered buying a Napa property, he sought Mr. McCoy’s advice. One thing led to another, and he was offered the job.

Among the first things he had to do, he said, was shed the sommelier’s air of omniscience.

“There’s pressure to have an opinion about everything,” he said. “One of the greatest assets I had was coming in here from a position of absolute ignorance.”

“Because I knew so little, people have been much more accepting of me asking an enormous amount of questions,” he said. “That might not have happened if I had been president of another big wine company.”

This was not his first time in that position. Mr. McCoy grew up in a tough neighborhood in Washington, D.C. Through the Careers Through Culinary Arts Program, he earned a scholarship to the Culinary Institute of America. There, he heard vocabulary that he had never encountered before, like mirepoix and consommé.

“It forced me to shut up and listen,” he said.

For wine writers encountering paradoxical wines like the Heitz cabernets, it’s not a bad lesson.