a fine wine tasting archive
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Henry-Frédéric Roch co-directed DRC for thirty years and always stood at the back of the photograph. This is the wine he made under his own name — whole-bunch, near-zero sulphur Clos de Bèze, from a 2005 only now beginning to open.
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.
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.
Maurice Drouhin bought forty-one parcels from eight owners in the 1920s to assemble this vineyard, then found old papers saying it had once made white wine, and replanted half of it with Chardonnay. The 2005, at fifteen years.
Bob Lindquist planted Syrah in Santa Barbara County when almost nobody in California thought it was worth the trouble. A single-vineyard bottle from 2005, opened at fifteen years, to see whether the argument had held.