BY NOW THE MODEL is well established. You start with a large fortune made somewhere else, buy a vineyard in the hills overlooking the Napa Valley, hire a hotshot winemaker, an even hotter, preferably French-born, winemaking consultant, a star viticulturalist and, finally, a famous architect to build your winery. Wait for the vines to bear fruit and, fingers crossed, the big scores from the critics to roll in. Call these moguls-turned-vintners the sons of Harlan, in honor of Bill Harlan, the former real-estate entrepreneur who decided to create a California first growth after touring Bordeaux and Burgundy with Robert Mondavi in 1980. Some 30 years later, Harlan's voluptuous Cabernet-based Napa Valley red has become an iconic wine and inspired legions of imitators.

Mr. Harlan's flesh-and-blood son, Will, at first resisted going into the wine business. After graduating from Duke, he worked for a telecom company in Colorado before starting up a price-comparison website for outdoor gear. But eventually he found himself drawn back to the family business, which must have been a relief to his father, who had conceived a 200-year plan for Harlan Estate even before Will was born in 1987.

After returning to Napa, the younger Mr. Harlan began working with a winemaking team led by Cory Empting on a new project that's being unveiled today, a more affordable version of Harlanesque hedonism called the Mascot. The grapes come from the younger vines on Harlan Estate and from Bond, a label Bill Harlan created 12 years after founding his eponymous estate, to bottle wine from other sites that he judged to be of grand-cru quality.

"I was able to convince the team to give me a few barrels of wines from the younger vines of the estates," Will told me when I visited this summer, "and this wine became what we drank around the table with family and close friends." Whereas the 2008 Harlan Proprietary Red Wine was released to mailing-list customers for $750, and will cost even more than that on the rare occasions when it turns up at retail (or, brace yourself for sticker shock, on restaurant wine lists), the Mascot is priced at $75.

The 2008 Mascot is by no means a pale imitation; it's a bold, rich, full-bodied red that's drinking nicely now, especially with food. It has enough structure to improve with a year or two of cellaring, but it's way more approachable than its big brother, the 2008 Harlan, which, uncharacteristically, will need several years to show its charms. One of the signatures of the red wine crafted by winemaker Bob Levy from this hillside vineyard is a voluptuousness and early accessibility very different from the standoffishness of young Bordeaux, or of old-school Napa cabs. Most young Harlans, including the 2009, are hard to resist, though as Bill Harlan reminded me (when I failed to spit out the 2009, as is customary at professional tastings) they often go through an unexpressive period five or six years afterward. The older Mr. Harlan, whom I first met in 1997, has one of those intense stares that carries such conviction that if he'd told me the inky black Harlan I was enjoying was a white wine, I would have probably agreed with him.