Nightmare Hall, Level Six
TASTING NOTES: “This is a fortified dessert wine. Aromas and flavors are of dried blueberries and currants complemented by spice notes of nutmeg, allspice and clove. Framed by a suggestion of toasted walnuts, this dessert wine is a special after dinner treat that is easily enjoyed with salted nuts, intensely flavored hard cheeses or simply on its on its own. Like many fortified wines, it will age gracefully for a decade or more, even as it is enjoyable now.
Each vineyard component was fermented separately in bins. Fruit was punched down twice a day until the ideal sugar level was reached. At this point, approximately halfway through fermentation, neutral grape spirits were added to arrest fermentation and create a fortified dessert wine.” (AbV 19.2%)
VARIETALS: 75% Cabernet Sauvignon (St Helena, Oakville, Oak Knoll), 25% Petit Verdot (Rutherford)
BARRELS: Aged for 24 months in neutral French oak barrels 416 cases made
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Dulce.
Spanish for “sweet,” obviously, but also the name of a small town in New Mexico that has become ground zero for one of the more committed conspiracy theories in American folklore. The Dulce Base. According to a surprisingly robust canon of believers, there exists beneath the Archuleta Mesa an underground facility jointly operated by the U.S. government and extraterrestrials — multiple species, in fact, with different levels getting progressively weirder the deeper you go. Level one: security. Level five: alien housing. Level six (called “Nightmare Hall” by the people who are definitely making this up): genetic experiments. The whole mythos traces back to a man named Paul Bennewitz, a physicist and businessman who in the late 1970s became convinced he was intercepting alien transmissions near Kirtland Air Force Base. The Air Force, for reasons that seemed sensible at the time, responded to this by… feeding him more false information, apparently hoping to distract him from actual classified projects. This worked in the sense that Bennewitz did become distracted — by an increasingly elaborate inner world of tunnels, treaties, and cattle mutilation that consumed the rest of his life.
The Dulce Base has since developed its own extended universe. There are maps. Detailed, confident, cross-referenced maps of a facility that no one has ever seen. Escapees. Insider testimony. A “Dulce Papers” document cache. It is, in its own way, an impressive feat of collective world-building — thousands of people adding canonical detail to a place that exists entirely in the imagination, the way Tolkien fans argue about Elvish grammar or Star Trek writers debate warp physics, except everyone involved believes it is completely real and also involves lizard people.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
- Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year!
- Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
