Still Heavy After Everything
TASTING NOTES:
2018 Gordon + Bitner Block - “This Cabernet Sauvignon is dense purple-red in color. Fragrant cassis aromas with nuances of mint chocolate, olive, and graphite. Blackberry and blueberry flavours flow through the medium to full-bodied palate, balanced harmoniously with fine-grained tannins and integrated notes of French oak. A contemporary McLaren Vale Cabernet Sauvignon that expresses the synergy of this noble variety, the terroir, and my personal winemaking philosophy.” (AbV 14.3%, pH 3.64)
2019 Gordon + Bitner Block - “Deep, ripe blackberry flavors create a complex and harmonious balance of long, slow maturation and oak integration.” (AbV 14.3%)
VARIETALS: 100% Cabernet Sauvignon
BARRELS: Oak barrels.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: The Gordon + Bitner Block — the vineyard these grapes come from, named for Kym Davey and Andrew Browne’s respective grandfathers.
There is a specific kind of move that happens when you name something after your grandfather. It’s not the same as naming it after yourself — that’s ego, straightforward. And it’s not the same as naming it after a living person — that’s flattery, complicated. Naming something after your grandfather is a declaration that you carry someone with you, that a person who is gone still has weight in the world, that the thing you made is also, somehow, theirs.
What I find interesting is how uneven this impulse is across human endeavor. Sports arenas go to whoever cuts the biggest check. Streets get renamed every generation. But there’s a whole category of quiet, stubborn memorial — vineyards, fishing holes, a boat, a bench in a park — where the logic is purely personal. Nobody outside the family is expected to understand the full significance of “Gordon” or “Bitner.” The name is doing double duty: label on the outside, private meaning on the inside. The wine ships internationally. The grandfathers stay local, in the way that grandfathers do.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from this sale, the page you’re on right now, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year (October)!
Want Protected Summer Shipping and don’t think heat will be a problem? Order from the sale linked here! We’ll still try to get them to you with as little travel time as we can.
Some places get absurdly hot during the Summer, and in particularly unpleasant circumstances, it can damage a wine. Most people get theirs no problem, but there are a couple each Summer that fall victim to the sun no matter how fast we get them to you. If you’ve experienced that before or are afraid it’ll happen to you, we’ll hold your order for you until October, if you order from the Summer Hold sale. We are reasonably sure things will be cooler then.
