Cafes & Wineries

Formulaic is an adjective that is often leveled at some of California’s top boutique wines and their winemaking. As if when you finally manage to afford all the components required to make a high-end wine, that somehow you just throw them together and, “poof” you’ve got yourself a $300, 94 point superstar.

This stereotype is especially convenient for those who can’t afford to drink such wines. I should know. I still can’t afford to drink such wines, and while I’ve learned better now, about 10 years ago I believed that the only thing special about big name wines was how much money people spent making them.

Not much richer now, but older and wiser by far when it comes to wine, I’ve come to realize that if it were just about money, then everyone and their brother would have a mailing list 5 years deep. If there is a formula to making a world class wine, it’s so damn complicated that no one can simply buy it.

But nonetheless, it certainly is possible to set out to create a world class wine, and actually succeed. You might say that everyone begins that journey, but very few actually complete it. And if you look closely at those who do end up with truly fantastic wines, the common denominator is not money (though most certainly have that in common) it is something much harder to come by: a combination of knowing what the hell you are doing and the willingness to work your ass off.

Jess Jackson most certainly qualifies for the designation of a guy who knows his stuff. One of the most successful wine moguls of America, Jackson’s successes range from the amazingly consistent supermarket wines of his Kendall Jackson brand to the luxury wine of Cardinale. So when Jackson decides to buy a few of Sonoma county’s best hillside vineyards, plunks a house down amidst the rows, and begins a “little project” to make world-class Bordeaux blends, one should pay careful attention.

Vérité Wines is Jackson’s “little project.” Founded on the simple premise of farming the absolutely best quality Bordeaux varietals possible in Sonoma County and then turning them into carefully blended masterpieces, Vérité is one of the few highly sought after wines from Sonoma County that is not made from Pinot Noir.

Winemaker Pierre Seillan comes to Vérité after a long and distinguished career of winemaking in Armagnac, the Loire Valley, and Bordeaux, where he spent nearly 20 years as technical director for seven chateaux in the region. Recruited by Jackson in 1997, Seillan holds the title of “Vigneron,” by way of explaining his role both in the cellar and in the vineyards, much like the winegrower-winemakers that are much more common in Europe. Seillan wields total control of the winegrowing and winemaking operation at Vérité (with an awful lot of help, of course) to produce wines that reflect his particular vision of what his vineyards have to offer the world.

Seillan describes his three vineyard sites in terms of “micro-crus” — small sections within the vineyards which possess their own unique characteristics, and which Seillan attempts to harness like a conductor managing the various tones of a chamber orchestra. With all the notes available to him, Seillan constructs three melodies each year, named La Muse, La Joie, and Le Désir. Each is a particular blend of varietals, vineyards, and flavors that walks the line between paying homage to the Old World while embodying the New. La Muse emphasizes Merlot, La Joie, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Le Désir, Cabernet Franc.

This fine line between classic Bordeaux styling and California power is a difficult one to walk, and in this, my first taste of these wines, I′d have to say Seillan does it remarkably well. These wines have a brawn that you’ll rarely find in Bordeaux, but they are miles from the extracted, oak-laden Cabernets that are far too common in California.

That isn’t to say these wines don’t use oak. After careful harvesting, sorting and individual fermentation of the grapes from each block of the vineyard, the wines spend 16 months in new French oak barrels, but despite this long engagement, the wood has only a suggestive presence in the wines, rather than a dominant flavor. After barrel aging, the wines spend another 18 to 24 months in bottle before release. I do not know what the case production levels of these wines are, though they cannot be very high.

As I mentioned, this is my first time tasting these wines, and I found them to be truly impressive.

Full disclosure: I received these wines as press samples.

2004 Vérité “La Joie” Bordeaux Blend, Sonoma County
Inky ruby in color, this wine has a rich nose of dark roasted espresso, leather, and forest floor aromas that jump out of the glass. In the mouth it is surprisingly lithe given its powerful nose, and once past a deeply earthy first impression it offers beautiful flavors of cherry, tobacco, cassis and notes of herbs that seem like a light haze mixed in with the fine dusty tannins. The finish is long and dry. A very pretty wine. 66% Cabernet Sauvignon, 20 % Merlot, 10% Cabernet Franc and 4% Petit Verdot. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $150. Where to buy?

2004 Vérité “Le Désir” Bordeaux Blend, Sonoma County
Medium to dark ruby in color, this wine has a surprisingly Old World nose of earth, graphite, and the unmistakable scent of green bell pepper, which manages to hover well below the range of objectionable. In the mouth that greenness manifests as a hint of green wood studded in a matrix of bright cherry fruit dusted with fine tannins. Beautiful texture and a long finish make for lingering pleasure on the palate. 49% Merlot, 47% Cabernet Franc, 4% Cabernet Sauvignon, with a splash (0.1%) of Malbec. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $150. Where to buy?

2004 Vérité “La Muse” Bordeaux Blend, Sonoma County
Dark ruby in color, this wine has a brawny nose of pipe tobacco, cola, and incense. In the mouth it reminds me of an operatic baritone — rich, clear and resonant with flavors of cherry, tobacco, cola, and beautiful cedar notes that merge with the drying, powdery tannins. “Hot damn” I wrote in my notebook, “this is definitely the best Bordeaux blend I’ve ever had from Sonoma County.” And all the while the finish kept going and going and going. 86% Merlot, 8% Cabernet Franc, 4% Cabernet Sauvignon, 3% Malbec. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $150. Where to buy?

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Some people seem to get into the wine business through sheer determination. After years of saving, scraping, dreaming and planning, vineyard or winery ownership is the fulfillment of many people’s long held (if not hard earned) fantasies.

And then there are those people who somehow seem destined for it — people whose stories you hear and you think, how on Earth did you manage not to do this earlier?

If Stephen Singer was going to fall into one of these categories it would most certainly be the latter. In 2003 he became the proprietor of a small winery called Baker Lane, which was the end of a long road, and will no doubt be the beginning of another.

Singer has been in the wine business in the San Francisco Bay Area for decades, starting with a small wine shop and distribution business in the City that began over 30 years ago. His retail skills and wine knowledge were parlayed into wine consulting for many restaurants, eventually landing him at Chez Panisse, where he was the wine director for many years (and also was married to owner Alice Waters). After leaving Chez Panisse, Singer went on to become a restaurant owner and entrepreneur, a career which still takes up much of his time. He is a partner in the popular Cesar in Berkeley (next door to Chez Panisse) and the newly opened West Country Grill in the town of Sebastopol in Sonoma County.

As if that weren’t enough, Singer has been importing artisan olive oils and vinegars from Italy for over ten years. I find myself asking, is it any wonder that this guy eventually had to get his hands on a vineyard?

Singer was waiting for just the right piece of land, apparently, and eventually found it in a ranch just outside of Sebastopol, where two sloping edges of small valley in the Laguna de Santa Rosa watershed offer good exposure for Syrah and Pinot Noir.

To make his wine, Singer has enlisted veteran winemaker Steven Canter, who currently also makes wine for Davis Bynum and Quivira, as well as for his own personal label Luddite Vineyards. I suppose with a label name like that, it goes without saying that Canter doesn’t go for much fancy-shmancy technology when it comes to making wine. Canter, who comes to winemaking first via music and then via a series of jobs in most every facet of the wine industry, has developed his craft through experiences working at Torbreck Winery in Australia and Foris Vineyards in Oregon, among other places.

Canter makes this wine from grapes grown on the east-facing slope of a hillside vineyard that sits nearby Singer’s property near Sebastopol. The Hurst Vineyard is planted with the Pommard, 777, and 115 clones of Pinot Noir, which are hand harvested and fermented in small lots. The wines age in large (450 liter) French oak casks, of which 40% are new and the rest (including some smaller barrels) are old enough to be classified as “neutral,” meaning that they impart little or no additional flavor to the wine. The 570 cases of this wine that are made are bottled without fining or filtration.

The 2006 vintage represents the third commercial vintage (and the second I have tasted) from this small winery. It confirms for me that Baker Lane is on the path to being another coveted producer of excellent Sonoma Coast Pinot Noirs. 2006 wasn′t an easy vintage for Pinot Noir in many places, but this wine shows a steady hand in the vineyard and cellar.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Cloudy medium ruby in the glass, this wine has a pretty nose of exotic spices and raspberry fruit aromas. In the mouth it is beautifully soft, like baby skin or velvet, and offers bright raspberry fruit flavors laced with mixed herbs that seem to expand on the palate as the wine lingers in a long finish that elicited a “wow″ note in my tasting book. This is an honest, excellent wine that is a pleasure to drink.

Food Pairing:
Not overbearing in the slightest, this wine is very food friendly and I’d gladly pour it alongside grilled rosemary and pork tenderloin brochettes.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $39

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

It’s hard to believe that in the early 1990’s less than 100 acres of vineyards were planted in Chile’s Casablanca valley. In little more than two decades, this region of Chile has surged in growth and popularity, and is currently producing excellent wines that generally represent fantastic values on the world market. The region is currently home to more than 10,000 acres of vineyards.

Back when the grape acreage was still in the triple digits Agustin Huneeus decided that the Casablanca valley was one of Chile’s most promising wine regions, and that he needed to start making wine there. Not surprisingly, the world took notice. Huneeus was not just any aspiring winemaker. Indeed, by 1990 Huneeus could lay claim to being one of Chile’s first great modern wine pioneers.

In 1960 Agustin Huneeus entered the Chilean wine scene by becoming CEO and majority owner of Concha y Toro, the wine brand that would eventually put Chile on the wine map for the rest of the world. In 1971 the political climate in Chile became unstable and Huneeus left for the United States, where he took over the helm of the beverage giant Seagrams Worldwide for a time, as well as Franciscan winery in Napa. He went on to purchase the Quintessa winery in 1989.

The early 1990’s were calmer times in Chile, and Huneeus was afforded the opportunity to spend more time in his home country exploring the continually expanding wine regions, including the Casablanca Valley. These explorations turned serious rather quickly, and before long Huneeus was the proprietor of a brand new Chilean winery called Veramonte.

Veramonte, by now, is a well established producer of quality Chilean wines, and a recognizable brand for anyone who strays into the global section of their wine shops, as well as those who have a thirst for reasonably priced Sauvignon Blanc, of which Veramonte makes a seemingly never-ending supply.

Veramonte makes primarily single varietal wines with a sole exception: this wine called Primus. The story of this Bordeaux blend goes all the way back to Bordeaux in the 1800s, when a wave of French immigrants were setting off to the new world to try and make their fortunes. Being French, they weren’t going anywhere without their wine, and knowing that they were headed to an unknown world, the only way to ensure that there would be wine there was to bring the vines to grow it themselves. So off they went to Chile with vines representing the best of Bordeaux packed in wet sawdust and paper. Only a couple of decades later these few samples and others like them would be some of the only vines that were not utterly destroyed by the Phylloxera epidemic that ravaged Europe’s vineyards.

When Bordeaux got to replanting their vineyards, they did so carefully and methodically, but for some reason, they pretty much ignored one of the grape varieties that was originally common in their vineyards: a grape called Carmenere. To be fair, they also gave Malbec short shrift as well, and now Bordeaux is mostly Cabernet, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc, while Chile has been trying desperately to turn Carmenere into its signature grape.

Unfortunately, in my opinion, Carmenere isn’t that special of a grape, and the single-varietal Carmeneres I’ve tasted haven’t impressed me greatly. What Huneeus knew, however, and Chilean wineries are increasingly discovering, was that Carmenere is an excellent blending grape, and as part of blends that resemble the ancient wines of Bordeaux, it is beautifully expressive.

And that is why Veramonte’s top wine is a blend of Carmenere, Cabernet Sauvignon, and Merlot. The best grapes from the top vineyard parcels are carefully sorted, destemmed, and fermented separately before blending and aging for 2 years in French Oak barrels, about 50% of which are new each year. The wine spends an additional year in bottle before release.

With the level of care, aging time, and the designation as the winery’s top wine, not to mention a snazzy, heavy bottle, it’s easy to imagine this wine as one of the more expensive Chilean wines around. Hell, it even tastes expensive. But I’m happy to say instead that it undeniably represents one of the best values in the wine world today.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Medium to dark ruby in the glass, this wine has a nose that would make even the most distracted wine taster immediately pay attention: perfumes of chocolate, cherry cordials, and vanilla waft from the glass. In the mouth the wine is beautifully balanced, with a polished feel on the tongue, and the flavors seem to burst in the mouth. Cherries, chocolate, and old wood paneling swirl in a storm of fine grained, dusty tannins and velvet texture. The wine’s finish is long and has beautiful aromas of cocoa powder and confectioners sugar. Surprising, unique, and totally delicious.

Food Pairing:
This is a rich wine, though not one slaked in oak, so despite its brawn, it is quite food friendly. I’d love to drink it with some lightly spiced slow-cooked pork on crunchy bread.

Overall Score: around 9.5

How Much?: $19

This wine is available for purchase on the Internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

There are those in the wine world who seek out (and often pay for) the best possible advice they can get. Winemaking and winegrowing are sciences as much as they are arts, and these days, there are plenty of experts to be had in both arenas. And then there are those in the wine world that no matter what the scientists, experts, and even their friends say, choose to follow their instincts. Call them pig-headed, call them eccentric, call them iconoclasts, there are certain people that will always walk their own paths when it comes to wine.

Jim Dierberg seems to be one of those people. He’s a man that puts a lot of stock in his intuition. He proposed to his wife on their first date, and the first time he set eyes on a piece of property near Santa Ynez Valley he knew it was where he needed to live and to make wine. And not just any wine. Jim decided that this little plot of land was where he was going to make the Cabernet that he had dreamed of making for years.

Never mind that the idea of making Cabernet Sauvignon in the chilly, fog-influenced Santa Ynez Valley (known, for good reason, for it’s cooler climate Pinot Noir and Chardonnay) was pretty much the most insane idea anyone had heard of for some time. Jim spent nearly ten years fending off his friends and neighbors, all of whom confirmed the insanity oh his plans. In those ten years he methodically planted his vineyards and experimented with rootstocks, built a winery, and (perhaps just to prove that he wasn’t totally bonkers) bought some land in the neighboring Santa Rita Hills and started making excellent Pinot Noir and Chardonnay under the Dierberg Estate and Three Saints labels.

Jim’s faith in his own vision wasn’t easy to shake, perhaps because Jim lived on the property that came to be known as Star Lane Vineyards for those ten years. And he needed little more than a good set of eyes and a thermometer to prove to himself that the tiny little North-South valley where his vineyards climbed up the steep valley walls was a climatological anomaly. At the start of his driveway, several miles away, the mid-summer fog would be thick and the air a chilly sixty degrees Fahrenheit, but out his front door it would be sunny and between 80 and 100 degrees.

Indeed, the Happy Valley, as this little crease in the San Rafael Mountains is named, happens to be both the highest and the hottest place in the entire appellation. Daytime temperatures routinely climb above 100 degrees and nighttime temperatures often fall well below fifty degrees. This wide range of temperature, known as the diurnal shift, is coveted by winemakers for its ability to coax complexity and richness out of grapes of many varieties.

Now, after ten years of work, Jim and his winemaking crew, which includes winemaker Nick DeLuca and consultant David Ramey, are releasing the first vintage from Star Lane, including this wine, which is a special selection from three specific blocks of the vineyard. The vineyards are planted almost exclusively to Bordeaux varietals, with the exception of a little Syrah that is mixed in amongst the Cabernet Sauvignon, and are so steep in places that there is only one guy on Jim’s staff that is willing to drive the tractor between the rows (he apparently keeps asking for a raise on this account).

The vineyard management crew, all of whom are full-time employees rather than hired contractors, pick the grapes in the dead of night to escape the day-time heat, and load them in small batches into the winery (which has been built with two distinct sections, one dedicated to the Dierberg Estate Burgundy-style wines, and the other dedicated to the Star Lane project). The grapes ferment slowly with native yeasts, and are then aged in 100% new French oak barrels for 20 months before bottle aging another 14 months before release. The wines are never filtered and are fined lightly with egg whites before bottling.

Star Lane makes about 1900 cases of this special Cabernet Sauvignon, and about 9000 cases of their estate Cabernet (which is also fantastic).

Santa Ynez Valley, barring some serious effects of Global Warming, will never be known as a place that’s ideal for growing Cabernet Sauvignon, but if Star Lane Vineyards continues to produce blockbuster wines like this one, Santa Ynez Valley may well become known for at least one Cabernet.

Tasting Notes:
Inky garnet in color, this wine bursts out of the glass with a rich nose of earth, tobacco, and dark fruit aromas that had me salivating immediately. In the mouth it is rich, heavy, and pure liquid silk on the tongue, with powerful flavors of black cherry, vanilla, and chocolate mixed with an undertone of dirt. The wine has just the slightest touch of sweetness to it that I eventually decided was a hint of residual sugar, but couldn’t possibly hold against this wine in all its lusciousness. Perhaps it’s best to think of this wine as a monster Napa Cab, that isn’t from Napa. A wine for those times when you’d prefer that your wine not show a little restraint.

Food Pairing:
This is a wine that while perfect for grilled meat, I would simply prefer to drink on its own. It’s big enough to demand all of your attention.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $100

This wine is available for purchase on the internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

I make it my business to keep my eye on new California wineries, especially in Napa and Sonoma, as much as I can given the fact that I do a lot of other things besides write about wine. Whenever possible, I like to taste the first releases from these wineries. They are not always fantastic - some are good, some show potential, and some simply need to be written off as first efforts and retried again later. That’s the thing about wines, just because they’re not good now, that doesn’t mean they won’t be later, and, of course, vice versa.

It’s quite rare, however, for the very first vintage of a wine to knock my socks off. But when I got my first taste of Blackbird Vineyards out of the barrel a couple of years ago, I quite literally couldn′t bring myself to spit it out. I was immediately in love. And how delightful and against all odds that the best Napa wine I had tasted in many months was a Merlot.

Blackbird proprietor Michael Polenske is used to beating the odds unexpectedly. By all accounts he never should have gotten into wine in the first place. Spending one’s teens and early twenties in a fraternity at Chico State generally favors the the cultivation of a strong affinity for beer and bikinis rather than fine wine. But in between his finance classes, thanks in part to a roommate who turned him on to wine, he dabbled in the wine curriculum and spent weekends exploring Napa Valley visiting what were becoming his favorite wineries.

When he graduated from college, Polenske again took an unexpected turn, getting into the pragmatic financial planning industry just as everyone in that industry was moving towards more active money management. Polenske had the bright idea that he could do financial planning for people in the wine business, and so managed to find a firm in the Midwest that was willing to give him Napa and Sonoma as a territory. In addition to the territory of his choice, they also asked him if he′d be willing to cover the zip code 94025 as well.

It turned out that there wasn′t much interest in wine country, but Polenske found quite a lot of both interest and money in that other little zip code, which happened to be Atherton, California, and for which he found himself the sole representative in his company. Through a lot of trial and error, a ton of cold calling, and a significant amount of elbow grease, Polenske spent 10 years building a sizeable book of business in Silicon Valley, learning more about and continuing to fall deeper in love with wine in the process.

And then one day, relatively out of the blue, JP Morgan called and offered him a job as a private banker. Like a small town kid picked up out of high school by the Major Leagues, Polenske walked starry eyed into his first day at work, sat down next to his colleagues with their Wharton, Kellog, Harvard, and GSB diplomas on their desks, and when no one showed up to tell him how to do his job, he just did what he knew how to do. He started making calls.

At the time, the average JP Morgan banker brought on between seven and nine new clients per year. At the end of his first year Polenske had 35, a figure so shocking at the time, that executives at the highest levels of the company told his manager to get him on a global conference call so they could demand an explanation. Based on that call JP Morgan changed its approach to new client acquisition, and it wasn’t long before Polenske was in charge of the San Francisco office, and beginning to dabble in his other interests, including antiques (he would eventually go on to own Patina Atelier Antiques in San Francisco).

As Polenske’s star continued to rise in the financial services world, he kept his eye on Napa, thinking that someday it might be nice to build a lifestyle business. But each time he nearly got to the point of buying some land, another job opportunity would come along, and he’d be swept up into running a new company, division, or fund.

After years of almost buying vineyards, Polenske eventually decided to scrap the idea, and instead simply settle for a house on a hill in Napa with a pool. He ended up with a couple of houses on the flats, and a 10 acre vineyard. These things happen.

Napa has a way of turning people into winemakers overnight simply because they stumble on the right piece of property. Polenske’s acquisition, as you might expect, was a little more strategic than that. Call it a compulsion to seek out the undervalued parts of the market, or just call it instinct, but Polenske found himself staring at a Merlot vineyard that was selling fruit to prominent buyers who were making 90 point wines from it, yet the prices they were paying for the fruit were below market rates. Never mind that Merlot was on the down and out. Polenske saw the raw ingredients for the perfect boutique wine brand, and his idle fantasies about building a lifestyle business instead of another hedge fund began to crystallize. The vineyard was named Blackbird, and when Polenske found out that in French Patois Merlot means “little blackbird” the key turned in the lock and everything fell into place.

Today, with the help of winemaker Sarah Gott and winegrower Aaron Pott, Polenske farms the 10 acre estate vineyard to produce 1120 cases of a wine he has decided to call a Proprietary Red, though the wine will likely always be 90+ percent Merlot. Though it technically could be labeled Merlot, Polenske is keeping his options open to adjust the blend in the future, and doing a little bit of marketing by aligning the name with some of the big guns like Harlan Estate and Rudd who also produce wines with the same designation.

In 2005 the wine contained 96% Merlot and 4% Cabernet Sauvignon from the estate’s 11 year old vines in Napa’s Oak Knoll District. After meticulous sorting and careful crushing and fermentation, the wine ages for 20 months in French oak barrels of which 70% are new and 30% are older. The wine is bottled completely unfined and unfiltered.

In addition to this wine, in 2005 the estate has begun producing a rosé called Arriviste and a 50/50 Cabernet blend called Paramour.

Tasting Notes:
Dark ruby in color, this wine has an expressive nose of aromas of espresso and mocha, black cherries and chocolate. In the mouth the wine is nothing sort of gorgeous. At once explosively juicy and simultaneously rich and layered, beautiful, near-perfect acidity allows bright cherry fruit and spices to float above a deep resonant base of tobacco and earth flavors that all somehow meld and flex until they’re a vibrating chord through a stellar finish. This wine practically defines “delicious” and cellared well, will likely do so for 10 to 15 years.

Food Pairing:
Extremely food friendly because of its bright acidity, this wine will pair well with a lot of foods. I’d enjoy it with beef short ribs and horseradish potatoes.

Overall Score: 9.5

How Much?: $80

This wine is available for purchase on the internet.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Barry Schuler may know a thing or two about running multi-billion dollar technology companies, but what he really wants to talk about, given the chance, is food and wine. The former CEO of AOL, Schuler often gets credited along with Steve Case (who preceded Schuler as CEO) for the company’s success in the late Nineties. But while his colleagues and most of America’s top technology executives were returning home at the end of their long days to comfortable suburbs near major metropolitan areas, at the end of the week Schuler was making his way back to Napa, California. Schuler may have been one of the country’s top technology executives, but now he spends as much time thinking about wine as he does anything else.

Schuler says that he can remember wanting to live in Napa as early as the age of 18. In addition to dabbling in photography and filmmaking as a teenager, he says, “I was really into cooking. And drinking.” His obsession with food and wine, led him to the altar of Alice Waters’ restaurant Chez Panisse, which he visited for the first time in 1974 on the pretense of considering a graduate degree at UC Berkeley. Instead of attending his interviews and exploring the campus, however, Schuler dined at Chez Panisse, and drove to Napa, where he spent days wandering around in a daze. “It was like mecca,” he says, “like I was hit by a lighting bolt. It truly was amazing. I decided then and there that I had to figure out how to live [in Napa] someday.”

By his own account, Schuler spent the next 15 years “chasing French wine″ and working out the math that would get him back to the Napa valley. While he wasn’t in his own kitchen dreaming of his future Napa estate, Schuler was busy making a name for himself in the emerging world of digital interactive media. He founded an early advertising agency to serve the emerging home and business computing market, then ran one of the first successful Macintosh software companies, and finally ended up founding an interactive design agency called Medior, with several colleagues, including Tracy Goldman, who is now his wife.

Schuler finally moved to Napa in 1989, settling closer to the town of Napa than to the centers of culinary and wine activity farther up the valley, because he was attracted to the change he saw underway in and around the city of Napa. “It was a train wreck in those days,” says Schuler, but he saw something of a diamond in the rough in the scrabbly area to the east and north of town known as Coombsville. When he finally decided he wanted a bit of land on which he might one day plant some grapes, “mostly just to sell, I was thinking,” he says, “I started looking in Coombsville.” Good lots were not immediately forthcoming, so Schuler would spend several years poking around the area until in 1998, when someone told him that a 35 acre parcel was due to be sold in the area, and that he might want to take a look at it.

After rounding the shoulder of the hill and seeing the view of a green cow pasture roll out from underneath the mossy shade of oaks all the way to the San Francisco Bay in the distance, Schuler purchased the property on the spot, thinking he′d figure out whether it could grow grapes later.

What Schuler ended up with is an interesting geologic and climatologic anomaly in the region. The hilltop of ash and clay soil is layered thinly on a deep base of round river stones, and sits up higher than most surrounding points in the traditionally cooler region of Napa. This makes the property a little island of heat that misses much of the fog influence that creeps up from neighboring Carneros and the wind patterns that sweep through the rest of the region, which is a pending AVA (American Viticultural Area) under the name Tulocay.

With the help of vineyard consultant Michael Wolf, close friends Bill and Dawnine Dyer, (of Dyer Vineyards) and friend Tony Soter (of Etude Wines) set about carefully establishing their 22 acre vineyard, still with the idea that they’d sell the grapes, and perhaps make just a tiny bit of wine for themselves. After some struggles, the vineyard began yielding grapes in 2003, and by the time the 2004 grapes were going into bottle, it was clear that the fruit was on track to being exceptional. The folks who had purchased the initial lots of grapes were clamoring for more, and new requests were constantly being made.

“At that point,” says Schuler, “we couldn’t resist.” Barry and Tracy enlisted the Dyers to make them 40 cases of wine from the 2004 harvest, and asked them to become the official winemaking team for their first commercial release in 2005. For the name of their project they selected a rephrasing of Medior, the company that had brought them together, and arguably made possible the fulfillment of Barry’s teenage dreams. For their label they chose the silhouette of the solitary, ancient oak tree that anchors the center of their vineyards.

Most of Meteor Vineyard’s grapes are still sold to select wineries around the valley, but the family holds back enough fruit to make about 700 cases of their estate Cabernet, and about 90 cases of their Special Family Reserve, which represents the best barrels from each vintage.

TASTING NOTES:
2004 Meteor Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a perky nose of nutty, cherry aromas that are tinged with hints of tobacco and anise. In the mouth its initial impression is of brightness and good acidity, with earthier flavors of tobacco, leather, cherry, and a hint of “stemmy” green wood that doesn’t keep the wine from being tasty. Score: around 9. This wine is not commercially available.

2005 Meteor Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine bursts from the glass with bright cherry and chocolate aromas that are followed rapidly with sweet tobacco and vanilla scents. In the mouth it is silky, even sexy, on the tongue, with a nice weight to it. The wine is juicy, with acidity that might even be slightly too sharp in comparison to the rest of the beautiful lush cherry and cedar fruits that mingle with pipe tobacco to finish with great length and satisfaction. I would expect this wine to smooth out in the next year or so in the bottle, and continue to improve for several more. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $225.

2005 Meteor Vineyard “Special Family Reserve” Cabernet Sauvignon, Coombsville/Tulocay, Napa
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine smells of tobacco, earth, and cocoa powder. In the mouth it displays a deeper earthy quality than the label’s primary release. Nicely balanced flavors of cherry and wet earth, with hints of blue fruit, sit poised on the tongue, nicely balanced for a finish that feels like a leisurely backstroke in a placid pool, as the wine slinks and slips down the palate. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $300.

The 2005 vintage will be available for purchase starting at some point in the next couple of months. Interested parties can sign up for the winery’s mailing list on their web site.

I also had the opportunity to taste several clonal selections from different blocks of the vineyard, vintage 2007, that will soon be blended. These samples displayed a broad range of deep, complex fruit that are showing their first incarnations in the wines above. The clone 7 cabernet fruit was classically Cabernet Sauvignon — cherry with hints of stem tannins. The Clone 4 fruit was deep and earthy, with notes of slate and graphite aromas and spicy flavors of espresso and orange rind. Finally the clone 337 was an impressive, powerful luge-run of cherry fruit that nearly knocked my socks off. There are clearly many good things to come from Meteor.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

While often referred to as a single “place″ when it comes to wine, Napa is hardly a single monolithic growing region. Each of its 14 established AVAs (American Viticultural Areas) lays claim to a separate identity, characterized by geology, microclimate, and different histories of production.

The Oakville AVA has one of the most storied of such histories. It is home to the famed To Kalon Vineyard, purchased by H.W. Crabb in 1868, shortly after the installation of a railroad stop made the tiny village of Oakville spring to life. In 1876 Crabb’s neighbor John Benson bottled his inaugural vintage of Far Niente wine just down the road.

By the year 1880 the Oakville area had 430 acres under production, and these would nearly triple to more than 1000 acres in the next 10 years and continue to grow until Prohibition turned off the spigot in the 1920’s.

In 1965 Heitz Vineyards made the first vintage of Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet, a wine that Robert Mondavi probably tasted around about the time he established his own winery a year later. Over the next thirty years, Oakville would gradually become home to some of the best wines on the planet. Acre for acre, the Oakville appellation may be the heaviest hitting single wine region in the western hemisphere. It is home to many of the highest scoring and highest priced wines in America, including Harlan Estate, Screaming Eagle, and Dalla Valle, to name just a few.

Oakville is ground zero for Napa Cabernet, and with good reason. Year over year it produces some of the most tremendous wines in the valley. It’s hard to say that one particular area of Napa truly produces the best Cabernet, but it’s also hard to find someplace that has more claim to that title than the Oakville AVA.

Last week the Oakville Winegrowers Association put on its annual Taste of Oakville event, which gives members of the wine trade and the press an opportunity to sample wines from its members. This meant an opportunity to taste through a lot of excellent 2004 and 2005 Cabernets (as well as a few other reds and a few random whites), most of which I enjoyed greatly. There were a few wines at the tasting which I didn’t get a chance to taste, as they had run out of wine by the time I got there, but the list below represents all but a few of the wines poured. The tasting took place on the upper level catwalks of the Robert Mondavi Winery surrounding their large oak fermentation tanks, which you can see in the photo.

WHITE WINES
2006 Flora Springs Winery & Vineyards Soliloquy White Blend. Score: 9. Cost: $25
2006 Cosentino Signature Winery Oakville Chardonnay. Score: 9. Cost: $30
2005 Kelham Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc. Score: 9. Cost: $30
2006 Oakville Ranch Chardonnay. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $48
2007 Swanson Rosato. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $18
2004 Teaderman Vineyards Sauvignon Blanc. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $28
2007 Saddleback Cellars Pinot Blanc. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $24
2006 Robert Mondavi Winery Fume Blanc Reserve, “To Kalon Vineyard.” Score: between 8 and 8.5. Cost:$20

Now that we′ve gotten those out of the way, let’s move on to the main event, shall we?

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 9.5 and 10
2005 FUTO Red Blend. $250
2004 Harlan Estate Red Wine. $450?

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 9.5
2004 BOND “Vecina”. $400?
2004 BOND “St. Eden”. $400?
2004 Dalla Valle Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $150
2004 Sophie’s Rows Bordeaux Blend. $75
2005 Rudd Winery Oakville Estate Proprietary Red. $105

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 9 and 9.5
2004 Enzo Wines “Saunders Vineyard” Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon . $75
2002 Atalon “Beckstoffer Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $80
2006 Casa Nuestra Winery & Vineyards Tinto Classico - Old Vines Red Blend. $40
2005 Detert Family Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2004 Emilio’s Terrace Cabernet Sauvignon. $50
2005 Flora Springs Winery & Vineyards “Holy Smoke” Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards 575 OVX Cabernet Sauvignon . $??
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards 575 OVX G Major 7 Cabernet Sauvignon. $??
2005 Nickel & Nickel “Martin Stelling Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $135
2004 Opus One Red Blend. $165
2005 Showket Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Swanson Merlot. $38
2005 Tierra Roja Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $110

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 9
2005 Enzo Wines “Tierra Roja″ Vineyard Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon. $85
2005 Far Niente Estate Bottled Cabernet Sauvignon. $125
2005 Gargiulo Vineyards “Money Road Ranch” Cabernet Sauvignon. $54
2004 Kelleher Family Vineyard “Brix Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2005 Kelleher Family Vineyard “Brix Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2005 Nickel & Nickel “John C. Sullenger” Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon. $90
2005 Nickel & Nickel “Branding Iron Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon. $90
2005 Oakville Ranch Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2004 Paradigm Merlot. $44
2005 Showket Vineyards “Asante Sana″ Red Wine. $50
2005 Showket Vineyards Sangiovese. $35
2005 Stanton Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2005 Swanson Alexis Cabernet Sauvignon. $75
2002 Teaderman Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $80

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 8.5 and 9
2005 Cosentino Signature Winery Oakville Estate Cabernet. $75
2005 Ghost Block Cabernet. $55
2004 Oakville Ranch Robert’s Blend, Cabernet Franc. $90
2005 Paradigm Cabernet Sauvignon. $62
2005 PlumpJack Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. $74
2005 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve . $125
2005 Venge Vineyards, Family Reserve, Merlot. $45

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 8.5
2005 Groth Cabernet Sauvignon Oakville. $57
2005 Hoopes Oakville Cabernet Sauvignon. $65
2002 Kelham Vineyards Merlot. $45
2005 Oakville East “Exposure″ Cabernet Sauvignon. $100
2005 Robert Mondavi Winery Cabernet Sauvignon, Oakville. $45
2005 Tamber Bey Vineyard Estate Cabernet . $65

RED WINES WITH A SCORE BETWEEN 8 and 8.5
2002 Kelham Vineyards Reserve Cabernet Sauvignon. $100

RED WINES SCORING AROUND 8
2002 Kelham Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon. $45

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

If one were to speculate on the wine market as a savvy investor might in the small-cap stock market, the game would be the same: follow people you know with good track records. In the wine world, we’d also have to include a corollary about betting on great vineyard sites, but leaving aside the raw materials, it’s clear that most good wines don’t happen by accident. They’re made by talented people.

Finding talented people in Napa isn’t hard at first. There are a lot of them, many of whom have big brand names. When they start working for a winery, everyone pays attention.

But there are many more talented folks in Napa that never get the limelight of the big names. These are the “small cap” talents that are responsible for many of the small production wines throughout the valley that are just waiting to be discovered by anyone who can start connecting the dots between great vineyards and the people that work them.

Piña Napa Valley is owned and operated by the Piña Family, a name that might not mean much to most wine drinkers, but will turn the head of anyone who is reasonably involved in growing grapes in Napa. In the current generation, the Piña Family, through their firm Piña Vineyard Management are responsible for farming some of Napa’s most prestigious vineyards (Bryant, Pahlmeyer, Cafaro, Gemstone, Outpost, Showket, Sawyer, O′Shaughnessy, just to name a few), but the family has been making its home in the Napa valley since 1856 when their progenitor Bluford Stice led a wagon train into the valley from Missouri.

Only a few years after that wagon train, the family became involved in the wine business in Napa. They owned a vineyard just south of St. Helena, and Bluford Stice’s son became a prominent winemaker at the then famous Inglenook winery (now Rubicon Estate) The family has been part of the Napa wine industry ever since.

As early as 1979 the family had thought about making their own wine, even founding a company called Piña Cellars with that intention, yet somehow never found the time until they purchased a small property on Howell Mountain in 1996 and decided to put their viticultural talents to work for themselves.

Their Howell Mountain property is known as the “Buckeye Vineyard” and its partially terraced hillside surrounded by Redwoods, Oaks and Madrone trees border Ladera and Beatty Ranch.

The family has been producing wine from their estate vineyard for the past 7 years, and the last couple of years they have been acquiring long term leases on several more vineyard sites around Napa with the goal of producing single vineyard wines.

One of these sites is the D’Adamo vineyard which sits at the foot of Atlas Peak in the southern part of Napa. This sustainably farmed vineyard is planted with 100% Cabernet Sauvignon.

The Piña’s began their project with the wines being made by winemaker Cary Gott (a longtime Napa wine veteran and consultant who has worked for more vineyards than are possible to list). In 2001, Ted Osborne (of Storybook Mountain Vineyards most recently) took over as head winemaker, and is responsible for this particular wine. Osborne recently departed Piña, and has been replaced by the young Anna Monticelli.

This particular wine is aged for 18 months in 100% French oak (50% new) before bottling. 1147 cases are made.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Inky ruby in color, this wine has a rich and juicy nose of cherry and dark cassis aromas that are surprising and arresting for a Napa Cabernet. In the mouth the surprises continue with dark juicy flavors of black cherry and cassis wrapped in a package of silky tannins. The wine is beautifully balanced and dynamic on the palate, conveying darker fruits than typical for the varietal, making for an unusual and compelling experience. The wine finishes nicely, with lingering notes that nearly reach blueberry.

Food Pairing:
This wine would be a likely contender to accompany this beef stew with herbed dumplings.

Overall Score: between 9 and 9.5

How Much?: $72

This wine is available for purchase online.

Original post by Alfonso Cevola

Three years ago this week I was making my way around the top restaurants of Buenos Aires, ordering too much food, too much wine, and having a grand old time. I had come to Argentina, in addition to simply relax, to find out whether or not there was anything worth drinking made out of a grape called Malbec.

The answer, of course, was a resounding “yes!” I managed to figure out why some serious wine lovers (and critics alike) had begun to quietly suggest that Argentinean Malbec was going to be the Next Big Thing.

This wine was NOT one of the wines I discovered when I was bumping along the back roads of Mendoza. But after tasting it, I sure wish I had known that both sides of the Pulenta family were making such awesome wines.

Pulenta Estate (not to be confused with Bodega Carlos Pulenta, which is run by another set of Pulenta sons) embodies the continued dream of the Pulenta family which began three generations earlier, near the turn of the century.

Angelo Polenta (the “o” later became a “u”) and Palma Spinsati, like thousands of others at that time, immigrated to Argentina from Italy in 1902. They settled in the broad farmlands that still occupy the alluvial plains of Mendoza, under the shadow of the snow-capped Andes Mountains. With the determination that embodies so much of the immigrant experience everywhere in the world, they began to scratch out an existence for themselves as they set down their roots.

By 1914, they had moved a bit farther north to the town of San Juan and had started a small winery and a very large family, one that would quickly grow to 8 children. Those 8 children went on to have their own children, while the family winery continued to prosper. From 1914 to 1997, the Pulenta family built a successful winery business that they eventually sold.

In 2001, a few years after the sale of their San Juan estate, Brothers Eduardo and Hugo purchased vineyard land not too far from where their family first began farming three generations earlier, and established Pulenta Estate Winery.

At 2900 feet above sea level, the estates 333 acres in the Lujan de Cuyo area of Mendoza typify the regions best managed vineyards. Densely planted, dry farmed vines imported from France and Italy are subject to some of the planet’s greatest temperature changes in the course of a day. This diurnal shift coupled with cool sunny days that typify the March harvest mean that properly tended grapes get to mature slowly and beautifully.

Like many producers in the area, the Pulenta estate produces three tiers of wine from their estate vineyards: a set of “Gran” reserve wines, a set of varietally labeled wines, and a set of “young release″ wines that are marketed under the brand “La Flor.”

Their top tier of “great” wines contains three different bottlings: a Malbec, a Cabernet Franc, and this, their “corte” or blend.

Comprised of 43% Cabernet Sauvignon, 29% Malbec, 21% Merlot, 4% Petit Verdot, and 3% Tannat, this wine represents the very best fruit from the winery. Picked from their best, lowest yielding vineyard blocks and then sorted painstakingly down to the individual berry level, each varietal is fermented separately and then aged separately for 12 months in new French oak barrels. Only then are the best of these barrels blended to make the roughly 515 cases of this wine that are produced each year.

Full disclosure: I received this wine as a press sample.

Tasting Notes:
Dark, almost inky garnet in the glass, this wine reaches out of the glass and grabs you by the scruff of the neck, suggesting (in the politest possible way) that you immerse your head in a cloud of cassis, black cherry, and well-oiled leather aromas. And once you’ve gone that far, you have to go all the way, letting the gorgeously satiny wine flow smooth and bright across your palate, soaking it with flavors that brilliantly mirror those initial aromas — deep cassis and black cherry, tinged with an leathery earthiness. The acid balance is superb, the tannins grippy with a hint of greenness that pleases more than it perturbs, and the finish is lovely. The wine overall gives the impression of being a smooth operator.

Food Pairing:
Give me a foot and a half of grilled blood sausage and a bottle of this and I’d be set for the evening - especially if I could watch the sunset fall on the Andes.

Overall Score: 9/9.5

How Much?: $35

This wine is tough to find. Some more recent vintages areavailable for purchase on the online.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy®

In some ways, if Mark Neal and his small winery, Neal Family Vineyards, didn’t make fantastic wines, it would be cause for extreme concern. Neal has been working in the vineyards since the age of eight, and his family business, which was responsible for his early employment among the vines, has been managing many of Napa′s finest vineyards for more than four decades. At this point, Jack Neal and Sons, which still carries the name of Mark’s father, who passed away in 1994, is the single largest vineyard management company in Napa according to Neal. They manage well over 2000 acres of vineyards for more than 60 growers and more than 70 wineries.

With so much prime Napa land under his direct control, and relationships with so many of the top producers and winemakers in Napa, if Neal Family Vineyards didn’t make great wine, they would have some serious explaining to do. Instead, Neal simply has purchased or contracted several vineyards around the valley over the past 30 years, and quietly makes small quantities of fantastic wine.

Mark Neal grew up in Rutherford, in the heart of the Napa Valley. When he wasn’t at school, he was on a tractor with his dad out in what were, at the time, a combination of prune and walnut orchards. Farming was the family business, to the point that when things needed to get done around the farm, every pair of able hands had to pitch in, including Mark. He fondly recalls his frequent breaks from school to work in the orchards.

“My mother was full Greek, and she was the one who would write the notes to get me out of school to work with the family,” he says with a wry smile. “My teachers used to be amazed at just how many Greek holidays there were each year.”

Calling the Neal family entrepreneurial might almost understate the case. Jack Neal realized early on that there was more future in growing wine grapes in the valley than in fruits and nuts. Neal moved into vineyard management before there were many people offering such services in the valley. With his wife managing the books, and his son at his side, Neal built an extremely successful vineyard management company that has grown and diversified over the years to include a vineyard development and construction company, a vineyard information systems and GIS systems company, and a bulk wine trucking company, all of which Mark Neal continues to manage on a daily basis, employing nearly 300 people.

The vineyard management company continues to be the pride of the Neal Family, and rightly so. Jack Neal and Sons currently manages the largest amount of Certified Organic vineyards of any vineyard management company in the state, some of which are widely acknowledged to be among Napa’s best vineyards.

“We started growing organic in 1984 for some clients, and at the time, I had no idea how we were going to do it. There weren′t very many [organic] materials available to us to use. Those few that were available were expensive, ineffective, or both.” Now, a full 90% of the vineyards that Neal farms are Certified Organic, with an increasing number moving towards biodynamic cultivation.

“We were also one of the first vineyard management companies to begin picking at night, starting in about ‘86″ says Neal, explaining his and his father’s self-education through trial and error in their attempts to help their clients make some of the best wine possible in Napa.

The one thing that Jack Neal never did, though, for all his knowledge and connections, was to make a wine under the family name before he passed away in 1994. He talked about it often with his son, and planted the seeds of a dream that Mark realized in 1998, adding yet one more business under the family banner, both in tribute to his father and as something that he could leave as a legacy to his own children.

At the moment, the Howell Mountain winery seems more like a playground for his kids, who, like their father in his youth, seem to have an endless amount of fun driving tractors around to cut the cover crops or disc the vine rows. The front of the (gorgeous) winery is beautifully landscaped with several species of dogwood trees and a pond filled with ornamental Coi (all designed and laid out fastidiously by Neal), but is also likely to be populated with several small bikes, the family’s two gregarious white German Shepherds, and most certainly one of Neal’s five children.

“Maybe they’ll want to be involved, maybe not,” says Neal, “but it will be an option if they’re not interested in construction or trucking.”

For now, it remains an intensely personal project for Neal, but one which he approaches with the seriousness that has made the rest of his businesses so successful.

Neal never actually ever uttered the phrase “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right″ in my presence, but he didn’t need to. It’s written all over everything at the winery, from the the building, with its inventive and beautiful wrought copper detailing, to the way the wine is made by winemaker Gove Cielo and assistant winemaker and enologist Kelly Wheat.

As one might imagine, the grapes are hand picked with extreme care, almost always at night. They are sorted rigorously and destemmed, and then given a long cold soak before a long slow fermentation with wild yeasts begins. Since the winery operates well below capacity, the wines are left to finish fermenting as long as they take in the vats, in separate lots for each vineyard block. Only the free-run juice (the juice which can be drained off the fermenting grapes without pressing) is used for the estate’s wines, and the press juice is sold off in bulk. The wine is aged in 80% new French oak (100% new for single vineyard wines) along with some Hungarian oak.

As the wines age, Neal and his two winemakers taste and grade every barrel independently, giving each A, B, and C ratings. Any barrel that gets three A’s becomes a single vineyard designate, and any barrel that gets even one C gets sold off as bulk wine. The reds are never fined, and are only coarsely filtered before bottling. Most spend at least 18 months in oak and then another year in the bottle, though Neal has been known to hold wines back if he doesn’t feel that they are ready for release (just as he has been known to refuse release of wines at all if they are not up to his standards, as the 2000s weren’t).

Neal Family Vineyards produces about 6000 cases of wine each year, the majority of which is their Napa Valley Cabernet, which is blended from fruit grown in four vineyards in Atlas Peak, Howell Mountain, Mt. Veeder, and Rutherford. In addition to this wine, the estate currently produces six single vineyard wines, made in quantities of between 140 and 240 cases, as well as even smaller amounts of Petite Sirah and Zinfandel. Recently the winery also produced a Sauvignon Blanc.

Neal Family Wines are marked by a brightness and a balance that immediately made me take notice when I first tasted them at a Family Winemakers tasting several years ago. I also couldn’t help noticing the prices of the wines, which Neal hasn’t changed since the first vintage.

If you are able to get your hands on a bottle, these wines are deeply satisfying and deftly represent everything that is good about Napa Cabernet.

TASTING NOTES:
Click on wines to purchase.

2005 Neal Family Vineyards Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Medium to dark garnet in color, this wine has a beautifully lean nose of espresso, tobacco, and dark chocolate aromas. In the mouth the wine is beautifully balanced between juicy, bright cherry and plum fruit and the lightly bitter cocoa powder and pungent espresso notes that emerge as the fine tannins cling to the tongue. The wine finishes beautifully — long drawn out notes of chocolate covered cherries that sing a plaintive song: “just one more sip….” Score: around 9.5. Cost: $45.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards Petite Sirah, Napa Valley
Medium purple in color, this wine smells smoky, leathery, and just a tiny bit funky (in a good way). In the mouth it is incredibly clear and bright with cassis and blueberry notes stretched between a hint of green stems and well oiled leather. Remarkably, the wine is only medium bodied and has fine, almost soft tannins that are far from the typical bruising grip that this varietal exhibits. Moderate finish. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $35.

2006 Neal Family Vineyards Zinfandel, Napa Valley
Medium garnet in color, this wine has a surprisingly chocolate nose, coupled with aromas of rich berries. In the mouth, chocolate continues to be the predominant theme, with some plump blueberries emerging at times amidst the silky palate. Frankly, this Zinfandel has a lot of Cabernet qualities, which are not so much unpleasant as they are unexpected. Score: between 8.5 and 9. Cost: $24.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Wykoff Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, Napa Valley
Medium to dark garnet in the glass, this wine has a gorgeously perfumed, sweet nose of cherry fruit and floral scents that have the purity of a cloudless day. In the mouth, the wine is beautifully dry and the sweetness of the nose resolves into nicely balanced and smooth textured flavors of black cherry, chocolate, espresso and a hint of earth - though the cherry dominates the lengthy finish. My notes include the word “beautiful” — circled and underlined. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Rutherford Dust Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Rutherford, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in color, this wine has aromas of cherry, mocha, and leather on the nose. On the palate the wine is silky and bright with flavors of cherry and plum, with light tannins that bring a smoky note to the tasting experience. The finish is gorgeously long. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “One Lane Bridge Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon, Mt. Veeder, Napa Valley
Dark ruby in color, this wine possesses rich chocolate and cherry aromas that give way to equally rich black cherry flavors in the mouth. Excellent acid balance coupled with a deep fruit character and beautiful texture make for an intense experience in the mouth, and the finish is scented with cedar. Fantastic. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Fifteen Forty Vineyard″ Cabernet Sauvignon, Howell Mountain, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in the glass, this wine has a pretty, spiced nose of cherry aromas mixed with a hint of allspice. In the mouth it continues in the spicy vein, as its predominantly cherry and cassis flavors are laced with notes of black pepper and tobacco. Bright acids and light tannins make this wine a pleasure to drink, right through its moderate finish. Score: around 9.5. Cost: $90

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Second Chance Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Atlas Peak, Napa Valley
Medium ruby in color, this wine mixes cherry aromas with the hint of green bell pepper that proudly proclaims Cabernet. In the mouth the wine is tightly coiled, but clearly expressive of leather, cherry, chocolate, and grippy, slightly aggressive tannins. The green bell pepper has come along for the ride on the palate as well, though not to the point of being truly objectionable, and certainly worthy of a second chance, perhaps in a year or two. Score: around 9. Cost: $90.

2004 Neal Family Vineyards “Howell Mountain Estate Vineyard” Cabernet Sauvignon, Napa Valley
Dark ruby in the glass, this wine from the vineyards surrounding the winery itself has a pretty, floral nose of cherry and hints of vanilla. In the mouth it is broad and expansive, with fine grained tannins that spread out, even as good acidity lifts flavors of cherry and plum over the tongue. A slight hollowness kept the wine from being as deep as it could be, but that’s a fine point on an excellent bottle of juice. Score: between 9 and 9.5. Cost: $90.

Original post by Italian Wine Guy&Acirc®