2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Tasting Notes
From the same crazed, suspicious, and all-around weird Sierra Foothills grower who scribbles implausible vineyard names in lurid violet visible ink on the scrap of paper he hands me, calling it a “Bob of Lading”. A cute name of letting me know to keep it quiet, almost certainly because he’s promised the entire crop to someone else. I didn’t get much, and wasn’t able to get the fermentation warm, but for a moderate-to-light tannin PS, it’s amazing. It’s got the perfume of a fruity bomb, but with lush fruit instead of light sweet jugginess, and dare I say it, the finest in now damned expensive American oak. The vineyard is barely closer to the place where the label photo was taken, and still hundreds of miles away, but I’m taking liberties even naming the county. As he wants payment in this wine, I will make a special label for him—perhaps a stoned Yosemite Sam?
Specs
Vintage: 2022
Varietal: Petite Sirah 81% & Syrah 19%
Appellation: El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Alcohol: 16.2%
2022 Panamint Playa, Paso Robles
Tasting Notes
This is what might have been the Colossus, had it another 1% alcohol - but it is the biggest and most structured of my final Paso Syrahs, with deep, plummy baked cherry fruit and onion-like layers of spice and oak. (Ahem! Lots of layers like an onion, not onion flavors; I’m sure you weren’t confused. I might say that it was aged in a new Tiramisu barrel, were there such a thing.) The fruit was almost 100% Hill of Graceland, and the last ferment I pressed there. A fitting coda for my Paso phase, as my client and grower there had decided to flip out - well, sell out - even before the winery just over the hill sold to gullible antipodeans for nearly a billion dollars. (I’m being polite here) Next thing, you’ll want me to explain the label. I’m not quite sure I can, and just now rued my failure to put GARBAGE COLLECTORS RESERVE in a shiny palladium sticker in the punt of the bottle - but I very recently hobbled bum knee and cane, indeed! over a mile up steeply Pleasant Canyon, label center in the mountains behind La Fontenot and Ballarat, in search of V. Girdiana.
Specs
Vintage: 2022
Varietal: Syrah
Appellation: Paso Robles
Alcohol: 16.1%
Total Acidity: 6.9 g/L
What’s Included
2-bottles:
1x 2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
1x 2022 Panamint Playa, Paso Robles Case:
6x 2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Owners: Dave Andrews, Stillman Brown and Joe Kraman
Founded: 2003
Location: Cayucos, CA
In ancient times, long ago, hundreds of years before the dawn of history, the consulting winemaker, assistant cellar sock monkey, and rock band mis-manager Stillman Brown of Red Zeppelin infamy, and his footloose and still insufficiently silent mouthpiece and de factoid attorney GD Lewis of Jory Winery, became Zeppelin Winery, and even since then have wines that at least one of them believes are at least more than good enough to have pretty much anything on the label, excepting hallucinogenic drugs.
Over the last decade, most of the wines have been from grapes grown by one of our crazier clients, in two concocted sub-appellations of west Paso Robles that split the hidden Hill of Graceland vineyard. He drives the tractor and poormouths himself, I do everything else… Sales are almost exclusively to our email list, though we make irregular appearances on Casemates.com.
Available States
AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, IA, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, MT, NE, NV, NJ, NM, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY
Begin in landscape mode, follow the prompts as you create a new post. There will be a moon/mountain icon in the bottom ribbon, use that to link up a pic. And HEIC or whatever Apple calls their format will fail miserably, pics must be jpg/png/gif.
And curious as to exactly where in west Paso. We ranched in west Paso, way back when, before all these high-fallutin appellations. Don’t recognize any of our “neighborhood” vineyard names any more except Peachy Canyon, Justin, Adelaida. Dick Hoenisch was just getting his imported/quarantined vines planted at the end of Adelaida rd. Where is this Graceland, or what was it in an earlier life? Our ranch, way back off Klau Mine Rd, was sold to become a vineyard/natural beef operation but can’t recall what they named it. I know, I know, the times they are a’changin, sigh…
2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Labrat reporting in!
Had to take this one out of town with me, but managed to get a nice meal paired with it.
Zeppelin!! That means Stillman Brown! I remember tons of crazy fun forum discussions back in the day!
Full disclosure, we usually lean towards “classically styled” lower alc wines, mid 14’s, etc., although we’ve enjoyed plenty of zins in the 15’s and every now and then the low 16’s.
Here’s the pic:
Dark, dark color, very deep and fruity on the nose. Deep, dark, and delicious on the palate. Hid the alcohol shockingly well! Shannon loved it. Called it jammy, but in all the right ways. Tons of fruit and structure. Highly recommended.
Paired this Petite Sirah with some prime tri-tip fajitas and it was pretty awesome. This wine could hold up to pretty much anything.
Sorry this is brief, it’s been a long day. Great wine, we really enjoyed it!
@PetiteSirah Dude! I got the friggin’ pics to load on my iPhone! What else do you want from me??? You are, of course, correct, here’s hoping a mod can edit for me since posting in landscape mode on my phone doesn’t give much of a view of what I’m typing…
@PetiteSirah@wnance OK I’ll put up another picture! Maybe 1000 of them so I don’t have to answer questions??? Because they say that a picture tells… Wait - how does that go?
@wnance I agree, it’s nigh on impossible to see what I’m typing with the phone in landscape.
You can always put up your comment with just the text, and then within the editing window turn your phone sideways and add your photos. Or just give up and add them in a separate reply.
It was Gill’s. He’s trying to sell but he’s no Daou.
Did you know Andre Tschellichef (sp) when he was working for Hoffman? One of my heroes, especially as he publicly praised my first red wine
@ZeppelinWinery Hmmm. This was mid90s. Stan Hoffman? Or am I dredging his name up from one of my other previous adventures? And Daou is another unknown name to me. Did not know Gill or Andre. All our neighbors were putting in small vineyards, mostly along Willow Creek and Adelaida. Damn, i’ll have to look up names. There were a lot of home-grown experiments in wine making. Bottles given to dinner hostesses who would surreptitiously pour them down the kitchen sink. There was one guy, however, who refused to give up and finally did produce a nice wine. It was a fun time, Paso was still a small town, largely undiscovered — until late 90s when wine tour busses careening down Willow Creek convinced us it was time to get out of Dodge with our cows, dogs and horses….
@ZeppelinWinery is the olive orchard still there on Willow Creek? We helped plant the trees imported from Italy. But the family got into trouble with the Feds for other reasons and we lost touch.
@gunny729 I don’t know how long ago that was… There are a couple of abandoned orchards at least one of them is definitely not olive… How far up or down Willow Creek Road was it?
@ZeppelinWinery my goof. Pasolivo olive orchard is on Vineyard dr. I see new owners (Dirks) bought it in 2012. I also goofed referring to Willow Creek Rd neighbors when I meant Vineyard Dr.
How much more are you saving by buying a full case?
(Note: tax and shipping are not included in savings calculations).
Zeppelin Winery Mixed Reds - $50 = 12.81%
Deputized rat, reporting for duty. We are pinch-hitting for our friend @salpo who, unfortunately, is separated from this bottle by an ocean.
The bottle is intriguingly lowkey. The words “Panamint Playa” glow below a photo that looks like an overly-filtered Instgram post. There is no label on the back. I asked my wife what she thought. “Looks fun,” she said. “But hopefully not ‘burning man’ kind of fun.” Indeed. At which point we noted a funny coincidence: We’ve camped in Panamint Valley! It was y2k (remember that?) and we went there to explore the vast expanse of scrub and a surprising dune nestled inside the valley while contemplating the end of the world that never came. But I digress…The off-handed DIY quality—well, it began to seem that was the point. Some quick Internet research confirmed. What I held in hand was a Syrah from Zeppelin winery, which, judging from the low internet profile, the lack of pretension on the few sites I could find, and the price point, meant we were in for something special.
The cork had a curious drip of light blue wax in the center, and some modest staining on the wine-soaked side of the cork.
At 2022, the wine is young. On PNP I noticed a gorgeous medium-to-deep ruby color. As the wine was still a bit chilly from being outside, it took a full hour of decanting to fully open up. But that made for a pleasant aromatic journey along the way. At first, just something peppery—maybe green peppercorn?—and a sense that there was lots more packed in there that had yet to emerge. Despite the 16% alcohol not a lot of heat in the nose. After some ten minutes, something earthy: potting soil? And then, as things got warmer, raisin, dry fruit, and finally some red plum…
It was bean burrito night at home. Not a good match for such sophisticated drink. So we broke out some brie and prosciutto in search of foods that could stand up. Both of these were ok but not great. Certainly a well-seasoned, grilled steak or something more substantial (and hot) would be fabulous. But the wine was even delicious with these food approximations, and also on its own. While the fruit had been hiding from the nose for a while, by the time I tasted it the first thing that came to mind was something in the dark fruit range, perhaps blueberry. “Fruit without the sweet,” is how my wife put it. We agreed that the wine has complexity and body, with lots of adventures to be had as it continued to open up: fruitcake, maybe anise, a long finish—ending with, er…a refreshing bitterness reminiscent of a bit of grapefruit rind.
In summary, the ride was grand—all the way from the head-scratching start to the palate-tickling finish. I am assuming this will be among the more lux Casemates wines, but it is definitely one that I would be more than happy to splurge on.
Thanks, @salpo and Alice for the opportunity. Cheers.
@tomapa The “curious drip” of colored wax is apparently a “key” to map to the contents of the bottle. I don’t think this is for the consumer as much as for the winemaker when sorting through bottles of produced wines. I never had it confirmed that each color mapped to a particular type but after a few years of ordering these I think I’d figured it out.
@PetiteSirah If she divorces you does that mean I will have two customers instead of one? Unworthy of me to ask - the real question is, do I get to be the Elvis tutor to the kids?
$28 a bottle is a very good price. Get a case, you don’t probably won’t regret it. Not alcohol hot forward, just done right. I have one 2009 left, then roll into 2012… Love/Hate drinking his wines. Drink and they are gone, sniff. Hate that I don’t have room for lots more.
Came back with the same idea, 2 bottles . Love the wines we have had from Zeppelin—impressed my wife, friends, and countrymen. Couldn’t afford a case this late in the credit card cycle, decided on 2 bottles, and too late.
Looks like a stop at Shaw Vineyards on Senaca Lake for a good Pinot noir is the only thing to get me back in my wife’s good graces
2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Tasting Notes
Specs
2022 Panamint Playa, Paso Robles
Tasting Notes
Specs
What’s Included
2-bottles:
Case:
Price Comparison
Not for sale on winery website, $744/case MSRP
About The Winery
Available States
AZ, CA, CO, CT, DC, FL, GA, ID, IL, IN, IA, LA, ME, MD, MA, MI, MN, MO, MT, NE, NV, NJ, NM, NY, NC, OH, OK, OR, PA, RI, SC, SD, TX, UT, VT, VA, WA, WV, WI, WY
Estimated Delivery
Monday, Mar 18 - Tuesday, Mar 19
Zeppelin Winery Mixed Reds
2 bottles for $64.99 $32.50/bottle + $4/bottle shipping
Case of 12 for $339.99 $28.33/bottle + $1/bottle shipping
2022 Darwinian Two
2022 Panamint Playa
Coda to your Paso Robles phase? Do tell…
@klezman Yes sir!
Actually I want to show pictures. I don’t know what you do that we will fill in the silly iPhone. That is the Tim Koch Grammer from speech to text
@ZeppelinWinery well discussed elsewhere, but…
Begin in landscape mode, follow the prompts as you create a new post. There will be a moon/mountain icon in the bottom ribbon, use that to link up a pic. And HEIC or whatever Apple calls their format will fail miserably, pics must be jpg/png/gif.
@ZeppelinWinery
As Ron mentioned…
@kawichris650 Thanks although I’ve only put up one picture so far
And curious as to exactly where in west Paso. We ranched in west Paso, way back when, before all these high-fallutin appellations. Don’t recognize any of our “neighborhood” vineyard names any more except Peachy Canyon, Justin, Adelaida. Dick Hoenisch was just getting his imported/quarantined vines planted at the end of Adelaida rd. Where is this Graceland, or what was it in an earlier life? Our ranch, way back off Klau Mine Rd, was sold to become a vineyard/natural beef operation but can’t recall what they named it. I know, I know, the times they are a’changin, sigh…
2022 Darwinian Two, El Pendejo Vineyard, Tuolumne County
Labrat reporting in!
Had to take this one out of town with me, but managed to get a nice meal paired with it.
Zeppelin!! That means Stillman Brown! I remember tons of crazy fun forum discussions back in the day!
Full disclosure, we usually lean towards “classically styled” lower alc wines, mid 14’s, etc., although we’ve enjoyed plenty of zins in the 15’s and every now and then the low 16’s.
Here’s the pic:
Dark, dark color, very deep and fruity on the nose. Deep, dark, and delicious on the palate. Hid the alcohol shockingly well! Shannon loved it. Called it jammy, but in all the right ways. Tons of fruit and structure. Highly recommended.
Paired this Petite Sirah with some prime tri-tip fajitas and it was pretty awesome. This wine could hold up to pretty much anything.
Sorry this is brief, it’s been a long day. Great wine, we really enjoyed it!
FOOLS! TOOLS! JEWELS! AWESOME!
@wnance PetitE Sirah.
@PetiteSirah Dude! I got the friggin’ pics to load on my iPhone! What else do you want from me??? You are, of course, correct, here’s hoping a mod can edit for me since posting in landscape mode on my phone doesn’t give much of a view of what I’m typing…
@PetiteSirah @wnance
OK I’ll put up another picture! Maybe 1000 of them so I don’t have to answer questions??? Because they say that a picture tells… Wait - how does that go?
@wnance I agree, it’s nigh on impossible to see what I’m typing with the phone in landscape.
You can always put up your comment with just the text, and then within the editing window turn your phone sideways and add your photos. Or just give up and add them in a separate reply.
It was Gill’s. He’s trying to sell but he’s no Daou.
Did you know Andre Tschellichef (sp) when he was working for Hoffman? One of my heroes, especially as he publicly praised my first red wine
@ZeppelinWinery Hmmm. This was mid90s. Stan Hoffman? Or am I dredging his name up from one of my other previous adventures? And Daou is another unknown name to me. Did not know Gill or Andre. All our neighbors were putting in small vineyards, mostly along Willow Creek and Adelaida. Damn, i’ll have to look up names. There were a lot of home-grown experiments in wine making. Bottles given to dinner hostesses who would surreptitiously pour them down the kitchen sink. There was one guy, however, who refused to give up and finally did produce a nice wine. It was a fun time, Paso was still a small town, largely undiscovered — until late 90s when wine tour busses careening down Willow Creek convinced us it was time to get out of Dodge with our cows, dogs and horses….
@ZeppelinWinery is the olive orchard still there on Willow Creek? We helped plant the trees imported from Italy. But the family got into trouble with the Feds for other reasons and we lost touch.
@gunny729 Not pouring them into the potted plant though… That’s cruelty to flora!
@gunny729 I don’t know how long ago that was… There are a couple of abandoned orchards at least one of them is definitely not olive… How far up or down Willow Creek Road was it?
@ZeppelinWinery my goof. Pasolivo olive orchard is on Vineyard dr. I see new owners (Dirks) bought it in 2012. I also goofed referring to Willow Creek Rd neighbors when I meant Vineyard Dr.
@ZeppelinWinery That’s a little prettier than Paso
No love for Tennessee on this offer… darn
Had to get in. Love me some Stillman wines. If anyone on the SF peninsula wants a split let me know.
@sdfreedive I can do 6! I am in SF.
Swill = InstaBuy.
Did I read that correctly? Final Paso Syrah???
Poor Elvis!
@LandRoverNut Elvis has left the building
How much more are you saving by buying a full case?
(Note: tax and shipping are not included in savings calculations).
Zeppelin Winery Mixed Reds - $50 = 12.81%
2022 Panamint Playa, Paso Robles
Deputized rat, reporting for duty. We are pinch-hitting for our friend @salpo who, unfortunately, is separated from this bottle by an ocean.
The bottle is intriguingly lowkey. The words “Panamint Playa” glow below a photo that looks like an overly-filtered Instgram post. There is no label on the back. I asked my wife what she thought. “Looks fun,” she said. “But hopefully not ‘burning man’ kind of fun.” Indeed. At which point we noted a funny coincidence: We’ve camped in Panamint Valley! It was y2k (remember that?) and we went there to explore the vast expanse of scrub and a surprising dune nestled inside the valley while contemplating the end of the world that never came. But I digress…The off-handed DIY quality—well, it began to seem that was the point. Some quick Internet research confirmed. What I held in hand was a Syrah from Zeppelin winery, which, judging from the low internet profile, the lack of pretension on the few sites I could find, and the price point, meant we were in for something special.
The cork had a curious drip of light blue wax in the center, and some modest staining on the wine-soaked side of the cork.
At 2022, the wine is young. On PNP I noticed a gorgeous medium-to-deep ruby color. As the wine was still a bit chilly from being outside, it took a full hour of decanting to fully open up. But that made for a pleasant aromatic journey along the way. At first, just something peppery—maybe green peppercorn?—and a sense that there was lots more packed in there that had yet to emerge. Despite the 16% alcohol not a lot of heat in the nose. After some ten minutes, something earthy: potting soil? And then, as things got warmer, raisin, dry fruit, and finally some red plum…
It was bean burrito night at home. Not a good match for such sophisticated drink. So we broke out some brie and prosciutto in search of foods that could stand up. Both of these were ok but not great. Certainly a well-seasoned, grilled steak or something more substantial (and hot) would be fabulous. But the wine was even delicious with these food approximations, and also on its own. While the fruit had been hiding from the nose for a while, by the time I tasted it the first thing that came to mind was something in the dark fruit range, perhaps blueberry. “Fruit without the sweet,” is how my wife put it. We agreed that the wine has complexity and body, with lots of adventures to be had as it continued to open up: fruitcake, maybe anise, a long finish—ending with, er…a refreshing bitterness reminiscent of a bit of grapefruit rind.
In summary, the ride was grand—all the way from the head-scratching start to the palate-tickling finish. I am assuming this will be among the more lux Casemates wines, but it is definitely one that I would be more than happy to splurge on.
Thanks, @salpo and Alice for the opportunity. Cheers.
@tomapa The “curious drip” of colored wax is apparently a “key” to map to the contents of the bottle. I don’t think this is for the consumer as much as for the winemaker when sorting through bottles of produced wines. I never had it confirmed that each color mapped to a particular type but after a few years of ordering these I think I’d figured it out.
@pmarin good to know this!
Great rattage, @tomapa, I wish I was trying this with you folks!
If you pass on Stillman’s wines, you’re foolish.
I literally have to buy everything he produces or my wife will divorce me. I’m not entirely joking, either…
@PetiteSirah If she divorces you does that mean I will have two customers instead of one? Unworthy of me to ask - the real question is, do I get to be the Elvis tutor to the kids?
I really don’t have room for any more wine, but surely I can find a spot to snuggle in just two more . . .
/giphy rigid-critical-flight
If anyone in Syracuse NY is interested in splitting a case, or partial split, reach out.
@winedavid49 No love for NH? Any way to add us in??
$28 a bottle is a very good price. Get a case, you don’t probably won’t regret it. Not alcohol hot forward, just done right. I have one 2009 left, then roll into 2012… Love/Hate drinking his wines. Drink and they are gone, sniff. Hate that I don’t have room for lots more.
Cases sold out! Any more a possibility?
Great two bottle price…or bad case price depending on how you look at it
/giphy depressed-thriving-poltergeist
In for two bottles. Couldn’t pass up the Pendejo reference
@ZeppelinWinery A few miles away from the Vineyard
that’s what I get for waiting for the workday to end…
was just checking back deciding on small pack vs case.
serves me right for waiting.
(unless by chance a bit more are somehow available again?)
Well so much for planning… The idea was to sell out two minutes before the sale was over
@ZeppelinWinery You have just too awesome wine, nobody in the know was going to wait long!
VAN GOGH! MANGO! TANGO! AWESOME!
@ZeppelinWinery good job today
Came back with the same idea, 2 bottles
. Love the wines we have had from Zeppelin—impressed my wife, friends, and countrymen. Couldn’t afford a case this late in the credit card cycle, decided on 2 bottles, and too late.
Looks like a stop at Shaw Vineyards on Senaca Lake for a good Pinot noir is the only thing to get me back in my wife’s good graces
Worked late kicking a customers 🫏 and missed out
can only hope a fellow MD fan bought some and is willing to ‘mate it out. 