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Merlot, the great grape of Bordeaux’s Right Bank, can produce wine with brilliant fruit, but also earth notes and engaging textures. Grown in the cooler, southern end of Napa Valley, rolling hills of clay soil, it offers California richness tempered with structure and complexity. A little Cabernet Franc adds aromatic interest and completes the palate. This is what we seek in making our Napa Valley Merlot, a wine that appeals with a sophisticated sense of earthy richness, plummy fruit, and a long, balanced finish.
In 2003, after a warm growing season, our reliable Fall heat burst pushed harvest quickly upon us. Persisting into the third week of September, it fully ripened our Merlot by the end of the first week of October (three weeks earlier than on average). This meant careful selection in the field of all grapes—selecting out any raisined or shriveled fruit to keep the wine’s freshness and vibrancy. This was truly a year to exercise both patience, for full phenolic ripeness, and selectivity, for exclusion of problematic clusters. We are proud of our results.
Good harvest potential depends on good vineyard work earlier in the year, and 2003 was no exception. That included thinning the crop to a balanced level, training the canopy to allow light into the clusters, and waiting for full ripeness in skins, seeds, and stems. In the cellar, we make sure the young wine has a chance to breath, which helps build the tannic structure, then polish it to a pleasing roundness. In the cellar, oak is used as a tool to develop the wine, never merely as a flavoring agent; you taste the wine, with its complexity of fruit, earth, and spice, but never the barrel separately.
Our 2003 Napa Valley Merlot is now fruity and luscious, in a sense the most classic style for Napa Valley. This wine is destined to be a crowd-pleaser, especially if that crowd is enjoying good food. It offers very full body and varietally true red fruits, yet the tannins are round and mouthfilling, so the resulting wine on the palate is still balanced. It answers affirmatively that a rich wine can be complex, nuanced, and elegant.
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