Francis Ford Coppola knew he had a special place when he bought the old Niebaum mansion in 1975. But, how special? Robert Mondavi, who came over from nearby Oakville to pay his respects, perhaps framed it best.

"You realize you have bought the most beautiful, the most important winery property in the Napa Valley?" Coppola recalls Mondavi asking. "You realize what this is?"

It didn't take long for Coppola to figure it out. The property once known as Inglenook isn't simply important in Napa Valley history - it's as close as Napa gets to hallowed ground, a spot that encompasses nearly the valley's entire wine history.

While much of Napa's fame today is measured in years, Inglenook's is measured in decades. A century ago, it made some of the best wines in the New World. Bottles like the 1941 Inglenook Cabernet are legendary; at a time when California wine was hardly refined, they proved that Napa was one of the world's perfect places to grow grapes.

For nearly four decades, restoring this piece of Rutherford bench land has been the looming mission in Coppola's life. It has been his family's home, his labor of love and occasional money pit - the one project that has stayed with him through ripe times and lean.

Now he's planning a grand finale: restoring Inglenook's legacy as one of Napa's great estates - and reviving the style of Cabernet that made it famous.

"I want Inglenook to be what it was," Coppola said during a rare interview. "It was Napa Valley's premier cru."

It's no surprise, then, that when the chance arose last year to buy back the actual Inglenook name, there was no question that Coppola would follow through and reunite the wine with the name that made it legendary. It was "the last step after a very arduous task of getting back the land."

The beginning: 1880

To understand Inglenook's importance, you must understand its improbable creation. Starting in 1880, Gustave Niebaum bought land in Rutherford, intending to create a top wine estate. Finnish-born Niebaum is often described as a sea captain, but by 1879 he was a partner in the Alaska Commercial Co. and was one of America's richest men.

Wine was a lark. Though he could have purchased any of Bordeaux's first growths, he chose to establish a vineyard closer to his San Francisco home. Over the next decade, he amassed about 1,000 acres from the valley floor to the top of Mount St. John, and planted 250 acres of vineyards - not only Cabernet, using cuttings he brought from Bordeaux, but everything from Furmint to Charbono.

Niebaum borrowed the Scottish name, Inglenook (meaning "cozy spot"), coined by the property's original owner, William Watson. Soon he built a winery with architecture that was not only grand but forward-thinking: Its concrete included an early form of rebar - cable car cables brought from San Francisco, not to stave off earthquake damage but to help the building shift as grape must was pumped through during harvest.

At a time when vineyards resembled orchards, Niebaum insisted on dense European-style planting - less than 4 feet between vines. Most California wine was sold in casks, but he set up one of the state's first bottling lines in his immaculately clean cellar as a way to ensure the provenance of Inglenook wines. He is thought to have devised the state's first grape-sorting table.

A full-page April 1890 feature on Inglenook in the San Francisco Examiner asserted that Niebaum had "performed a work of incalculable value to the State by demonstrating that California can not only produce wine, but can make a wine the equal of any in the world."

Niebaum died in 1908, and his widow, Susan, brought her niece's children, John Daniel Jr. and his sister Suzanne, to live at the estate. She kept Inglenook afloat during Prohibition by selling grapes to neighboring Beaulieu Vineyards. After she died in 1936, the Daniel siblings inherited the property, and John Daniel took over its affairs.

The Daniel years brought Inglenook's greatest glory. Winemakers like George Deuer produced an astonishing range of wines, including the Cask Cabernets, some of the finest reds ever made in Napa, and a varietal Charbono that became one of Inglenook's signatures.

Yet Inglenook's products never quite paid the bills, and the tough economic realities of midcentury American wine caught up with Daniel. He kept his historic mansion, but in 1964 he sold the winery for $1.2 million to Louis Petri, founder of Allied Grape Growers and United Vintners, the largest wine producer in California.

Despite promises to maintain its reputation, Petri quickly linked Inglenook to cheap jug wines. Five years later, when it was sold to spirits conglomerate Heublein as part of a $100 million transaction, its reputation was hobbled.

Reputation demolished

If United Vintners dented Inglenook's reputation, Heublein utterly demolished it. The Connecticut spirits company was mostly interested in leveraging the winery name to sell even more cheap wine.

Heritage Cabernet plantings were ripped out for Chenin Blanc. A parcel that helped produce the legendary 1941 Cabernet was plowed under to allow a barrel-storage building, a perennial eyesore that became so loathed in Napa Valley as a sign of corporate meddling that Coppola made a public event of its 2007 demolition.

The organic farming that had been in place since Niebaum's days was cast aside for conventional pesticides. When Heublein acquired Beaulieu Vineyards next door, this swath of Rutherford became a grim testament to the wine industry's darker tendencies.

"Heublein should never have owned this property," Rafael Rodriguez, Inglenook's vineyard manager since the Daniel era, said in 1999.

There remained one bright spot. In 1972, the Daniel family sold the original Victorian mansion and surrounding vineyards. Coppola, then a young director with "The Godfather" freshly to his credit, was hunting for property in Napa. He was outbid by an investors' group, but the county denied the group's request to subdivide the property and three years later the property was up for sale again. This time, Coppola didn't dicker. For about $2.2 million, financed with profits from "The Godfather: Part II," the core of Inglenook was his.

Grandfather made wine

Coppola often ties his wine business to his Italian family's lore - watching his grandfather make Prohibition-era family wine in a Spanish Harlem tenement. But, that doesn't quite tell the full story.

As a graduate student at UCLA, he became familiar with Inglenook's neighbor, Beaulieu, occasionally stopping in to persuade the staff to sell him a case of the 1960 vintage.

Wine pervaded his Hollywood circle. He learned about Bordeaux from Gore Vidal and about Burgundy from dinners hosted by Bill Cosby (who was a teetotaler, but ensured there were bottles of Romanee-Conti on the table).

"By then I knew there was such a thing as great wine," he said. "So that was the person who bought the Niebaum home."

Soon after moving in, Coppola and his wife, Eleanor, discovered a pile of old Inglenook bottles dating back to 1890 in the cellar. On occasion he would sneak down to grab one - including on the day Mondavi came to visit.

"I said, 'There's this wine in the cellar,' " Coppola recalled. "We went down. We took another bottle of the 1890. We brought it up and I opened it up for him, and the perfume of it filled the room and we drank it. And it was wonderful and he started dancing around and said, 'See, a Napa Valley wine' - and here it was in the actual cellar - 'You can make a wine as great as any in the world.' "

Coppola was already contemplating his own wine, preferably a red blend in the style of Bordeaux, like the first-growth Chateau Margaux he admired. In 1977, he borrowed about $40,000 from his mother to buy winemaking equipment, and made a trial vintage. He liked it enough that the inaugural vintage of Rubicon was vinified the following year.

Once again the property was making wine of the quality that John Daniel demanded. Coppola, by that point aware of the value of linking his own efforts to the winery's storied past, named the estate Niebaum-Coppola.

Film career in tumult

Even as Coppola launched his winery, the rest of his career was in tumult. The epic production of "Apocalypse Now" had gone awry, leaving him in financial ruin. He decided to make one film per year for the next decade to rebuild his bank account, all while trying to launch Rubicon.

Initially, he got help from Andre Tchelistcheff, the Russian-born winemaker at Beaulieu and adviser to nearly everyone else who was largely responsible for Napa's postwar success. Rubicon was always an ambitious wine - the first labels were printed by Tiffany & Co.

In 1984, a young consultant named Tony Soter took over. He fine-tuned the vineyards and softened the wine style, which under Tchelistcheff's hand had been so stoic that the inaugural 1978 vintage was held nearly seven years before release.

Seven years later, Soter handed the reins to Scott McLeod, who would guide Rubicon through its teen years. Napa's style of Cabernet was growing more expansive and rich, and McLeod followed suit, breaking with what was sometimes sniffily described as a "Bordeaux-style" approach.

As Coppola built his wine empire, launching less-expensive wines to pay the bills, the Inglenook brand had become a hot potato in the land of corporate wine, tossed from Heublein to R.J. Reynolds to Grand Metropolitan and Canandaigua (the precursor to Constellation Brands).

Coppola's big chance

In 1995, Canandaigua decided to sell its portion of the property. Coppola immediately saw the chance to reunite the entire estate, and for about $10 million bought the remaining vineyards and Niebaum's original chateau, where he vowed to again make wine. In 2002, he purchased 140 acres of the neighboring Cohn ranch for nearly $34 million. And he put distance between Rubicon and the more populist side of his business, wines like Francis Ford Coppola Presents, which he gave their own slightly theme-parky home in Geyserville.

In 2006, Coppola changed the property's name to Rubicon Estate, but he had begun to question the trajectory of his grand effort. In the fields, he saw old vines ripped out for replanting, mostly to increase yields. Rafael Rodriguez, who had managed Inglenook's vineyards since the 1950s - and was crucial enough to its success that one of Coppola's early moves was to rehire him for $40,000, an estimable salary in 1976 - was essentially forced out.

"I questioned some things I saw happening," Coppola says. "I would go off and make movies, so I'd come back and see these changes and I was specifically disturbed about what I thought was happening to the vineyard."

McLeod's wines had been well-received, although overshadowed by the daredevil style of Napa's top cult wines. The winemaking had, to Coppola's mind, become too technocratic - too far from the classic style that had defined Inglenook. It no longer reflected the possibilities of the Bale loam soils that had a century-long track record.

"Ultimately," he says, "I felt there was too much science being employed. And I wanted more instinct."

But how to return the wines to their classic bones? By the time McLeod departed in 2010, Coppola had tapped a Bordeaux consultant, Stephane Derenoncourt, who began reeling Rubicon back from the exuberant, if heavy-handed, style that marked the early 2000s. (McLeod wasn't the only notable to depart; master sommelier Larry Stone, who had been tapped as estate manager, left as well.) Coppola brought in candidates from around the world to interview.

Margaux winemaker

One was Philippe Bascaules, the winemaking talent behind Chateau Margaux. Bascaules fit precisely into Coppola's scheme - someone who knew how to run a top estate.

Bascaules arrived on Niebaum Lane last October, just in time to navigate one of Napa's trickier, colder vintages. It was the perfect time to find a lighter step. The presumed blend of the 2011 Rubicon - the wine's name isn't changing - will land around 13.8 percent alcohol, far closer in style to the Inglenook of old than anything that has come off Coppola's land in recent years.

"I don't want to make a Bordeaux style. I just want to make a wine I like," Bascaules says. "This is the big challenge, to make the wine impressive, but not aggressive. A lot of expensive wines are very aggressive for me."

To complete the change, Coppola planned to build a new winery, very much in the mold of Niebaum's 1880s design: big enough to handle all of Inglenook's 250 acres, with the wine made in small lots and moved by gravity.

Acquiring the name

But there was one final piece: the Inglenook name. By the time the Wine Group bought it in 2008, along with Almaden and Paul Masson, as a $134 million purchase from Constellation Brands, Inglenook meant just another cheap wine.

Coppola, though, saw something different. Old Inglenook Cabernet was cherished at wine auctions; in 2004, a single bottle of the 1941 went for $24,675.

"I thought, just logically, maybe the people who knew of the cheap box wine Inglenook didn't know of the value of the old wine Inglenook, and the people who knew of the value of the old wine Inglenook didn't know of the existence of the cheap. So maybe it wasn't trashed."

Last April, Coppola announced he had bought the name and trademark from the Wine Group. Financial terms haven't been disclosed, and the privately held Wine Group was tight-lipped, aside from calling it "a proud moment for the California wine industry."

But for Coppola, it was a final checkmate after 37 years of rebuilding one of California's most revered vineyards. That might explain why, later this spring, the 2009 Inglenook Cask Cabernet will be unveiled with a label that's essentially a facsimile of John Daniel, Jr.'s midcentury version.

In a very Act III sort of way, Inglenook will be whole once again. And Coppola, having spent at least $46 million on his mission, seems content with his four decades of work.

The next steps are more likely to be taken by his daughter, Sofia, and son, Roman.

"I'm very aware that Inglenook is going to maybe reach a golden age after I'm gone," he said. "In the wine field, it takes decades and I'm 72. So clearly I have 10 years, or maybe more, to make it happen.

"I'd like to see it. But I know my children will see it. So that makes me happy."

-- A shift in wine and farming styles, G7

Rubicon's style goes back to the future One key piece of reviving the Inglenook name was to shift the style of Rubicon closer to the Cabernets that had brought the estate fame in the John Daniel Jr. era. The wines of the Daniel years were very much classically styled Napa Cabernet: picked at moderate ripeness, fermented in upright wooden vats, aged in mostly old wood casks. They were made with few of the modern techniques that seem mandatory nowadays, and yet many of them have endured through the decades, showing the sheer quality of the Niebaum vineyards and the volcanic and bale loam soils in the heart of Rutherford. But Francis Ford Coppola is clear that he wants to circle back to the style that brought Napa its earlier fame - which means retrenchment from the more lavish wines that marked Rubicon's recent years. Winemaker Philippe Bascaules' task is, as Coppola puts it, to "learn what a Napa wine is." I expected to see a few hints of the shift. So when Bascaules poured his probable blend of 2011 Rubicon, I was stunned. This is not Rubicon as we have known it. It is an extraordinary young wine, 95 percent Cabernet Sauvignon and 5 percent Petit Verdot, complex with dry-herb and graphite accents that hint at the Napa benchland, plus fresh cassis fruit. Dense and sinewy, it has thus far absorbed the 100 percent new French oak in which it is being aged - as Bascaules put it, "a really good sign of the strength of the wine." It finished around 13.8 percent alcohol, in part because of the cool vintage but also a sign of decisions made in the vineyard and at harvest. Given Bascaules' previous job at Chateau Margaux, there's a temptation to tag the wine as a return to what had been considered an older, more Bordeaux, style. Yet the dusty refinement of tannins and the forward fruit mark it as very much Napa. It has a kinship with Inglenook's midcentury style, except for all that oak. By comparison, a barrel sample of the 2010 Rubicon is notably different: bigger and fuller of roasted fruit, thicker and ropey in its texture, with evident oak presence and a slight awkwardness. It could be a sign of a tricky vintage, but it could also be the sign of a wine in transition. Bascaules said he hopes to have the approximate level of the 2011's ripeness each year - though he has no interest in making wines that don't show the variations of vintage. "If you make wine with overripe grapes, you could make the same wine anywhere," he said. Rubicon also made a standout Napa Zinfandel, the Edizione Pennino, and a sample of the 2011 shows an energetic, kirsch-edged wine full of perfume and leafy raspberry - a reminder of Zinfandel's best charms. While Cabernet is old hat to the former Margaux winemaker, Zin is a completely new specimen. Yet he has a newcomer's zeal for the grape. "For me," Bascaules said, "Zinfandel could be a great wine." - Jon Bonné