A bright future as a medical researcher once beckoned Elizabeth Vianna. In the mid-1990s, only a few years out of Vassar with a degree in biology, she was the chief of the clinical toxicology laboratory at Cornell Medical Center. She was thinking of going to medical school, and, as an art and music enthusiast, she loved living in New York. “My dad’s from Brazil, where I was born, and my mother’s El Salvadorian, and honestly, New York is the first place I felt at home,” she said in an interview in Midtown last week. “Everything made more sense here. I’d sit in a bar and tell someone about my background, and it was a non-event.”

And then she abruptly gave it all up, including a rent-stabilized apartment on York Avenue, to move to California and devote her life to wine. Ms. Vianna is now the winemaker for Chimney Rock, a winery that has long specialized in making cabernet sauvignon in Napa Valley’s prestigious Stag’s Leap district. She was in town last week to introduce the second vintage of an unusual white wine called Élevage, modeled after the great white Graves of Chateau Haut-Brion in Bordeaux.

“At Vassar, I’d drink the sort of wine that poor students bring to dinner parties,” Ms. Vianna said. “I didn’t notice wine again until a few years later when a friend invited me to share some special wines, which his father had cellared back in the 1970s. We had Latour, Mouton Rothschild, and Lafite Rothschild that were perfectly mature. That got me thinking about wine in a serious way.”

A decisive moment came in 1995, when Ms. Vianna attended a pre-auction lecture on winemaking at Christie’s. “They poured the 1985 Chateau Sociando-Mallet, a great and affordable Bordeaux,” Ms. Vianna said. She also took to heart a lecture by Christian Moueix, whose family firm owns Chateau Pétrus, among other Bordeaux properties, as well as Dominus, an elite Napa Valley red wine. Mr. Moueix praised the level of education that aspiring winemakers receive at the University of California at Davis. “That kind of did it,” Ms. Vianna said. “I decided to change careers. Certain friends encouraged me, saying that I was too artsy to do just science. Winemaking would be the perfect blend. But not everyone agreed. Three other friends almost did an intervention. They felt I should stick with science.”

Ms. Vianna sent away for an application to Davis, but when it arrived, “I put it away for a while, before I gathered the courage to fill it out,” she said. In 1997, she began her studies at Davis, where her lab skills were a plus. For her master’s thesis, she established a new method of measuring real-time formation of volatile esters (compounds that contribute floral and fruity aromas to wine) during fermentation. The method, using “solid phase microextraction coupled with gas chromatographymass spectrometry,” was described in her paper, which was published by the American Chemical Society in 2001.

Her “Euro-centric” tastes match those of Chimney Rock’s current owner, Anthony Terlato, a secondgeneration Chicago-based wine merchant, as well of those of the winery’s founders, Hack and Stella Wilson. In 1970, the couple had failed in an attempt to buy Chateau Phelan-Segur in Bordeaux. They were counseled to look to the Napa Valley by the wine authority Alexis Lichine. “Napa is to California as Bordeaux is to France,” Lichine is supposed to have told the Wilsons. In 1980, the couple bought a 180-acre, 18-hole golf course that became Chimney Rock. As a student, Ms. Vianna had interned at Chimney Rock. In 2002, after brief stints at other wineries, she returned to Chimney Rock, where she was promoted to winemaker three years later. “I still find golf balls in the vineyards,” she said.

Ms. Vianna arrived at Chimney Rock just in time to take part in the creation of Élevage Blanc. The project grew out of a dinner in Chicago in 2001 when Mr. Terlato and Doug Fletcher, a longtime winemaker at Chimney Rock who now oversees several Terlato properties, shared a bottle of Chateau Haut-Brion Blanc 1985 from Mr. Terlato’s cellar. They decided to try to make a similar wine at Chimney Rock. Usually, high-end California white wines are pure chardonnay, but this one is a blend of sauvignon blanc and sauvignon gris, a grape rarely used even in Bordeaux, despite its bright and lively aromatics and flavor profile. Unlike most white Bordeaux, Élevage contains no sémillon, which typically gives a lanolin-like and honeyed character to the blend. “It’s just too warm here for sémillon,” Ms. Vianna said. “It would make Élevage too heavy.” The 2005 Élevage (soon to arrive at Morrell Wine Shop, 1 Rockefeller Plaza, $36) is a strikingly elegant wine, touched by vanilla and pear notes. Just when lesser wines seem to fade on the palate, Élevage seems to expand. It would be a perfect partner to a richer-flavored fish such as striped bass, or to a roast chicken.

I don’t have a clear memory of the 1995 Haut-Brion Blanc, which I tasted only once years ago, but Élevage is right up there with another superlative white Graves, Chateau Pape Clément Blanc, at half the price of its Frenc h cousin. It’s the kind of wine that, in keeping with Ms. Vianna’s nature, blends science and art.