(Wine-Searcher) - The Napa winery enjoys bucking the fashion for supercharged California wines.

Many California vintners reduce the alcohol in their wines. Very few admit it, much less boast about it.

Randy Dunn is the exception. He likes Cabernet to have ripe fruit flavors, but doesn't want it over 14 percent alcohol. So he uses technology – reverse osmosis – to get the alcohol to 13.9 percent. Restrained alcohol in a high-end Cabernet has made him a hero to many wine lovers, though it cost him four years of reviews from the Wine Advocate, which ended up hurting business more than he expected.

"You gotta draw the line in the sand somewhere," Randy says.

His son Mike Dunn hates alcohol reduction. When Mike takes over the winery on Howell Mountain in Napa Valley, he says that's one thing he'll change.

"I don't want to spend my (expletive deleted) weekend de-alcing," Mike says. "I would like to stop but I don't want to make 15 percent alcohol Cabs either. I'm firmly in the low-alcohol camp. I just don't want to manipulate it."

Randy and Mike are an interesting pair. They don't look much alike, which makes sense because Mike is actually Randy's stepson. But they share a rugged, energetic physicality. Randy is wiry and fit; Mike looks like the ex-football player that he is – squat and powerful. He complains about having to lift wine barrels by hand, but he does it, whereas most wineries would use a forklift.

Soon after Randy married Mike's mom when Mike was a kid, he moved the family into a drafty converted carriage stop on Howell Mountain with no air conditioning and only a wood-burning stove for heat. "I was firewood boy," Mike says. "I'd come home from school and chop wood." People think of Napa Valley as a life of ease, but it was as if Mike had moved back to the 1800s. One wonders if the phrase "evil stepfather" ever escaped his lips.

"I didn't think I'd work for my dad," Mike says. "He never showed any interest in me. I guess that's good. There was no pressure. He said: 'You don't want to work for me.' He's hard to work for. All my life people said: 'You should work for your dad.' But I didn't want to. He was my parent, and he was a disciplinarian."

Mike is 49 and does most of the day-to-day work at the winery now; Randy is 69. But Mike doesn't count on Randy retiring soon.

"Randy still makes the picking decisions," Mike says. "He doesn't have a system. He sees the numbers but doesn't pay attention to them. He goes on his whims. I'm orderly. He's chaos."

That description is relative. Randy likes to play the cowboy and looks the part, but he has a degree in entomology from UC Davis and was the first winemaker hired at Caymus Vineyards, where he worked for a decade and reduced the alcohol of the wines by "spraying water into the tank with a big hose", he says.