2020 Merlot

Tasting Notes

A great blend of hillside and valley floor fruit from McQueen and Figgins, with the addition of LeFore and Flying B. Beautiful red fruit shows up immediately with shades of blue following closely - something that I absolutely love. The wine is generous, rich, layered, and brings an ultra-long finish that has chewy tannins to frame it, with hints of barrel nicely integrated. This is a dense Merlot that is drinking well now but will cellar until 2038.

Vintage Notes

It was truly a pleasure to focus on farming in a year like 2020. A pleasant escape from all that was going on in the world and a great reminder that there is still light to be found in such darkness. We started out with bud break at our estate vineyard, LeFore, in April pushing green and quickly turning the landscape in to beautiful spring colors. As we went through bloom, we had some shots of rain that came through and created “shatter” throughout vineyards which naturally created lots of air flow, sunlight, and smaller crop yields throughout. This was a very warm and constant growing season overall with some smoke pressure from west coast wildfires that we seemingly escaped qualitatively. We began picking at LeFore on September 19th, and ended the vintage on October 22nd at McQueen. Overall the wines had fantastic density, perfect ripeness, balance, and really reminds me of a warmer version of the 2010 vintage - a very good sign.

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Technical Notes