A Brand That Did Not Last, a Bottle That Did

Jess Jackson built Kendall-Jackson into the largest family-owned wine company in America on the strength of a soft, slightly sweet Chardonnay that sold in the millions. Somewhere in the late nineties he decided he also wanted a label that serious Napa drinkers would take seriously, and Atalon was the result: launched in 1997, Merlot and Cabernet Sauvignon only, around twenty thousand cases a year, with fruit drawn from mountain and hillside sites — Howell Mountain, Mount Veeder — and from Carneros in the south.

The idea was a Napa red at a price between the everyday and the trophy, made with the resources of a very large company and the positioning of a small one. Jackson bought a Calistoga winery to house it. The brand ran for a number of years and then, like several of his Napa projects, was quietly absorbed into the portfolio and disappeared. Nobody talks about Atalon any more. The bottles, however, are still out there.

The Year

2001 was a strong Napa vintage — a spring frost that thinned the crop, then a warm, even summer and a harvest that came in without rain. The reds were concentrated and well-structured, and the year has generally aged better than its more celebrated neighbours on either side. For Merlot from hillside fruit, a cool-night, small-crop year is close to ideal.

In the Glass

Opened at the office late on a January night, close to twenty years from the vintage.

The cork had held. The colour was garnet with a brick rim, fully mature. The nose was in its tertiary phase and comfortable there — dried cherry and plum, leather, tobacco, a cedar and cocoa layer from the oak that had long since integrated, and a faint mint note that pointed at the mountain sites.

The palate had softened to something round and easy, with tannins resolved to velvet and the acidity still holding the middle together. The fruit had not dried out; it had simply turned from fresh to dried, and the finish went to cocoa and cedar and stayed a reasonable length.

Nothing about it was ambitious, and that was the pleasure. A Merlot from a label nobody remembers, from a company most people associate with a very different kind of wine, had aged for two decades into something entirely civilised. Napa Merlot has a reputation problem; bottles like this suggest the problem was never the grape.