It’s not easy finding Flambeaux Wine, despite its “flamboyant” name. One small AVA sign points down a drive off Jack Pine Road, itself a detour off West Dry Creek. If the drive and entrance are unadorned, the same can’t be said of the hilltop winery overlooking the valley, with St. Helena bold on the horizon. Only in such a landscape can the overbuilt seem to scale.
The winery itself was not the attraction, nor the growing popularity of its Alexander Valley cabernet or Dry Creek zinfandel. Instead, the tantalizing hint of a deeper kind of fulfillment beckoned: that of eternal life, if not for us then for our pets.
Stella is a popular winery dog, as winery dogs go: She was voted as the Best Winery Dog in the Tribune’s most recent “Best of Healdsburg,” which in Sonoma County is saying something. Some wine dogs are buoyant and playful, some somber and judgmental. Stella—a purebred Maremma sheepdog, from Tuscany or Abruzzo—is somewhere in between: quiet, but with a powerful reserved force that even gives coyotes pause, according to Flambeaux owner Art Murray.
Stella is snow white, her eyes, lips and nose black against the thick fur. She is also very clean: Not all sheepdogs are so well-kept. But Flambeaux Wine has high standards—visits are by appointment only, and customers are likely staying at the Montage or Madrona.
Which, by no coincidence, is where playful young Mella was introduced to the world last week, in a pair of meet-and-greets to give wine- and dog-lovers, and wine-dog lovers, a chance to see for themselves the next phase in pet appreciation.
Unicorn of a Dog?
Now when most winemakers talk about “clones,” they’re talking about varietals selected for specific qualities, such as flavor, color or intensity. The Dijon clones of pinot noir or chardonnay are well known; but the canine clone of a winery dog is a new thing entirely.
“I really think Stella is sort of a unicorn as a dog,” said Murray, Flambeaux’s ever-positive owner. “She’s just perfect. Tasters love her. Everyone loves her. And she’s got a very good disposition by Maremma standards.”
Efforts to contact the breeder from whom Flambeaux obtained Stella several years ago proved fruitless—the phone was disconnected, the email unanswered. Murray considered the options: “If you have the Secretariat of dogs and you can clone it, wouldn’t you?”
Evidently that’s the decision Flambeaux made. “There is that side of it, but I also just happened to love her,” he added. “And it seems so cruel that you only get a dog for 10 to 12 years.”
Cloning animals, which once seemed like the stuff of science fiction, is now an industry. The first sheep clone, Dolly, was created 26 years ago; since that time companies like ViaGen Pets of Texas have developed to provide cloning services for animals from cats and dogs to horses (like Secretariat, though it’s unlikely the Jockey Club registry would knowingly allow a clone on the track).
Also in their playbook is cloning endangered species, like the black-footed ferret of the Midwest, once thought extinct, and the rare Przewalski’s horse of Mongolia.
The cost for cloning a pet is not that great, if money is no object: $50,000 for a dog or cat, $80,000 for a horse. The process involves four DNA samples from the donor pet, obtained in a simple procedure that costs $1,600 (plus $150/year for storage of the DNA).
Although ViaGen became a business in 2000, only in the last 10 years or so has the “pet space” grown, and especially in the past five years.
“Ever since Covid, when everybody was stuck at home and lonely and we adopted all these pets—now we’re home with our pets more often,” said Lauren Aston, ViaGen’s business manager, who came out to California to introduce Mella last week. “Those bonds and those relationships have been more amplified, so this has become much more of a possible solution for folks.”
Although cloning a purebred dog or thoroughbred dog is one path, many people’s favorite pets are mutts—rescue animals whose provenance is, at best, a mystery. It might be impossible to replicate the breeding of a shelter dog, but a clone is a guaranteed solution.
As Aston described it, the biotechnology of cloning is no longer at the farthest reaches of science. It’s become almost pedestrian, and ViaGen has cloned “thousands of dogs and cats every year,” she said. “The opportunity and availability to be able to clone your dog and cat now has definitely become popular in a much more boutique type of crowd.”
A winery dog is one thing—and Aston is confident that Stella’s clone Mella is one of a kind. “I am very much a wine lover myself, and I truly believe that Flambeaux is the first,” she said. “I have not heard of any other wine dog being cloned.”
But if a winery dog, why not … a winemaker? Could ViaGen clone people? “That’s not our space, so we tend to not discuss that because that’s not in our wheelhouse,” Aston said quickly. “But you can certainly clone mammals.”
Indeed, while cloning began in the livestock arena, and has moved into pets, other avenues exist for the technology. “Polo is one of the big horse spaces where we see a lot of cloning happening, as well as different types of Olympic sport horses and rodeo horses,” Aston said.
Another possibility: military use. “We have a gentleman that we work with that started something like a Navy SEAL program for dogs,” Aston said. “So he is cloning a lot of this very one specific dog that he had years ago. And he’s training them for active shooting drills, how to respond to [a situation] where those dogs can get in and take out a shooter so much faster than a police officer could respond.”
Closer to home, Murray’s goals are simpler. “How they look is identical, or will be,” he said of the 9-year-old Stella and her 9-week-old clone, Mella. ”From a business side, tasters do love to see Stella when they come to a tasting.”
Going forward, they still can—even when Stella has gone to the stars.
Clone your own at viagenpets.com.
