(Wine-Searcher) - It's been a while since one of the family has made wine at the Napa favorite.

When you hear that Mark Beringer is chief winemaker for Beringer Vineyards, it makes sense. It sounds as if Mark, great-great-great-grandson of founder Jacob Beringer, is the latest in a long line of family members to make one of the iconic wines of Napa Valley.

Beringer Private Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon is certainly iconic. Since it was created in 1977, Beringer Private Reserve has been one of America's most highly regarded Cabernets: a safe go-to choice in steakhouses (especially on expense account meals); a wine to buy by the case and store, opening one on special occasions. Unlike the what's-new-and-hot cult Cab scene, Beringer Private Reserve is a wine where time is kept in decades.

But a Beringer making Beringer Private Reserve: that's completely new.

The last Beringer to be winemaker was Otto Beringer Sr. (Mark's great-grandfather), who made sacramental wine to keep the winery open during the depression. Roy Raymond Sr. married Otto's daughter Martha and took over as winemaker, working there for nearly 40 years until he and his relatives decided to sell in 1971. There was no Private Reserve then. So, the first time a Beringer has been in charge of it came after Mark took the chief winemaker job last April.

Mark Beringer, 48, was three years old when his family sold the winery to Nestlé. "They kept the strip of land in front of the winery," he told Wine-Searcher. "I remember running around up here."

The winery grounds look serene, but the business history has been anything but. The company went public in the '90s, and the Australian beer company Foster's launched an aggressive takeover, buying all the outstanding stock and combining it with its Australian wine portfolio. The resulting company has been restructured more than once and, today, Beringer is owned by Treasury Wine Estates, which has been rocked by the business challenges facing large-production Australian wine.

Beringer Private Reserve is one of Treasury's crown jewels, and ownership has been smart enough to see the value in that. For example, in an off vintage, they will downgrade the grapes into a cheaper wine rather than hurt the image of Private Reserve.

"In 2011 we made 1500 cases," Beringer said, and note the pronoun even though he wasn't at Beringer. "In '12 and '13 we were up around 10,000 cases."

The grapes typically come from seven vineyards around Napa Valley, but "it could be from any one of the seven", Beringer says.

In January, Treasury acquired 2000 more acres of Napa Valley vineyards in a huge purchase from Diageo, but there are currently no plans to use them in Beringer Private Reserve. Some of those already go into the flagship wine of the newly acquired brand Beaulieu Vineyard, Georges de Latour Reserve.

"We don't want to rob from the Latour," Beringer said. "We don't want everything to be a charred oak, homogenous wine. BV to me is just Rutherford. When you try the Latour next to the Beringer Private Reserve, they're both great wines and they're both very different. They should stay that way."

When asked about the philosophy behind Beringer Private Reserve, Beringer said: "The vision is to make a big, powerful, ageworthy wine that's very reflective of where it came from. There's a lot of mountain fruit in the wine. The key to the Beringer Private Reserve is getting all those layers in there. You want to get layer on layer to get that complexity."