Edition 47 | September 2024

Hello Mountain Wine Club,

 
We have a tremendous new wine to introduce to you: the 2021 Red Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon under our Restricted label, only available to Mountain Wine Club members. You might have heard some buzz that my team and I have been exploring vineyards in Washington State for a new project called Jett, which my assistant winemaker Gianna Ghilarducci is taking the lead on. During our first harvest in eastern Washington, we peeled off a small portion of fruit for Restricted – knowing that MWC members love discovery as much as we do. (At our core, winemakers are people who like to go places, get to know the land, and ferment things.)

The Red Mountain American Viticultural Area is a really interesting terroir paradigm to work with. There is a harsh beauty to the landscape, which makes the wines’ plush textures all the more revelatory. At the same time, the wine does taste like the earth: rocky, fresh, tinged with desert sage. The weather gets hot, the soils are high-alkaline, and there is almost constant wind. Temperatures can drop 40 degrees at night, crucial for retaining acid. We were fortunate to source the Cabernet from two highly regarded sites: Quintessence Vineyard at 800 feet elevation and Shaw 32 Vineyard at 700 feet.

We hope you find this Cabernet as uniquely delicious as we do. This region is moving beyond best-kept secret status – and if you’ve never tried a Red Mountain wine, you are about to see why its star is rising. You’ll also be hearing more soon about our higher elevation Skysill Vineyard, which we purchased a couple years ago at the cooler, rainier edge of Walla Walla, Washington. 

While great growing areas like Red Mountain are significant for the long term, wine does have its trends. Think about clothing – mom jeans are back now. Likewise, there are style cycles in wine. Certainly there have been some eras of overwrought and overripe wines. What has always kept me in check is growing in the mountains, where there is a different calculus. Rather than focusing on jamminess and sugar as the grapes ripen, I look for a combination of how the tannins are presenting themselves, what the acid is like, and how the concentration of flavor is. When those elements are in balance, I make a picking call.

The second wine in your club shipment is a beautiful example of mountain balance. We are especially happy to bring you the new La Jota 2021 Howell Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon after missing the previous vintage in the context of wildfires. From volcanic soils at 1,400 to 2,500 feet on Napa’s eastern side, Howell gives us a more velvety expression of Cabernet Sauvignon, which we further round and deepen with small percentages of Cabernet Franc, Malbec, Merlot, and Petit Verdot. The 2021 vintage shows great focus.

Enjoy the wines.

Peace,  
Winemaker Chris Carpenter