a fine wine tasting archive
11 notes
Colgin's IX Estate grows at eleven hundred feet on Pritchard Hill, above Lake Hennessey and the Napa fog line. The 2005, at sixteen years, showed what mountain Cabernet does with age that valley-floor wine cannot: keep its shape.
Nathan Fay planted the first Cabernet in what became the Stags Leap District in 1961, and it was a glass of his homemade wine that persuaded Warren Winiarski to buy the land next door. The 1992 is the third vintage of the vineyard bottled under Fay's own name — Napa Cabernet from a drought year, at twenty-nine.
Ed Durell bought a cattle ranch outside the town of Sonoma in 1977 and planted vines because the neighbours had. Forty years later the name is on half the serious Chardonnay labels in the county. Sojourn's version is all Old Wente, from two blocks, in the third year of the drought.
A rudius was the wooden sword a Roman gladiator received on the day he was freed. Jeff Ames named his own label after it — a few barrels a year, from other people's famous vineyards — and this is his Chardonnay from Larry Hyde's clay, in the coldest, wettest Napa year of its decade.
A Pinot Noir specialist plants a few rows of Chenin Blanc on shale above Monterey Bay, and the very first wine off the new site is not Pinot at all. Seventy-five cases, from vines in their third season.
Pax Mahle named his second label for the breaks in the coastal hills that let the Pacific air in. This Chenin Blanc, at twelve and a half percent with a hand-lettered label, is the label's idea in its plainest form — a grape almost nobody in California was taking seriously, picked early and left alone.
In 2005 Sine Qua Non split its reds into six lettered bottlings under one name — Atlantis, with the chemical formula for rust after it. The 2a is the Grenache from the estate's own Eleven Confessions vineyard, opened at sixteen years.
Next of Kyn is the wine Manfred Krankl makes from the vines outside his own door — a single vineyard in Oak View, one label that never changes, and a number on the neck instead of a name. No. 2 was the 2008.
Sine Qua Non's 2008 Syrah carried a portrait of a red-haired woman with her eyes closed and the terse name B 20. Among the house's reds it is one of the more inward wines — cooler, more mineral, less inclined to shout — which at thirteen years turned out to be the point.
For nine vintages Manfred Krankl and the Austrian sweet-wine master Alois Kracher made dessert wines together under a shared initial. The Straw Man was their vin de paille: Sémillon dried on straw mats, in half-bottles, and gone for good after 2006.
Every Sine Qua Non wine exists once — new name, new label, never repeated. The 2015 white, named for the French phrase for dusk, is a Chardonnay-Roussanne blend fermented 'as dirty as possible' and unlike anything else California makes.