Smuggled In Loaves Of Bread
TASTING NOTES: “In the glass it is deep garnet, nearly purple. Dark mineral tones reminiscent of slate soils come first, then graphite, dark chocolate, vanilla, and blackberry jam. It is full bodied and loaded with dark fruit, with round velvety tannins over a lively backbone and a finish that carries. Decant it for an hour, serve it just under room temperature, and put it next to something off the grill or a braise that has been going all afternoon. Cellared cool, it will keep growing for another decade. 2018 was the kind of season growers talk about for a long time. Spring came in cool, summer stayed warm without spiking, and fall stretched on so far that picking ran weeks later than usual. The fruit ripened slowly and evenly. Up here, above the fog, that gave us Cabernet with structure rather than sugar. It was hand harvested from a single hillside block, cold soaked for four days, then fermented in small tanks for another twenty-six days on native yeast. Malolactic fermentation came from the native bacteria in the cellar as well. The wine spent twenty-three months in French oak, only twenty percent of its new, because the site has enough to say on its own. Martin Bernal-Hafner, who took over the winemaking after Mark’s retirement and trained with M. Chapoutier in the Rhône and Paul Hobbs in Mendoza and Sonoma, keeps the hand light.” (AbV 14.5%)
VARIETALS: Cabernet Sauvignon
BARRELS: 23 months in barrel, 20% new French oak
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Graphite.
Every pencil you’ve ever owned has been lying to you. There’s no lead in a “lead pencil” and there never has been — when English shepherds stumbled onto a deposit of the stuff in Cumbria back in the 1500s, they figured the soft black rock scraping off on their boots had to be some form of lead ore, so the name stuck. It took chemists until the late 1700s to work out it was actually pure carbon, no metal involved, and rename it graphite from the Greek graphein, “to write” — same root as autograph, graph, and, fittingly, graffiti.
That Cumbrian deposit, by the way, was apparently so pure and so enormous that for a couple hundred years it was basically the only known source of usable graphite on Earth, guarded like a state secret and mined only a few weeks a year so the market wouldn’t get flooded. People smuggled it out in hollowed-out loaves of bread. All that intrigue over what’s now sold to nine-year-olds in boxes of 24 for a dollar ninety-nine.
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.
