Parking Lot or Playground? Dedication or Gate Block?

All righty kids, gather ‘round, it’s story time with Andy!

When I was ten years old, I attended a very small school. How small was it? The playground was in the parking lot. Now don’t worry, they had the parking lot closed to traffic during the day, so kids weren’t darting in and out of cars. One day I fell down playing basketball and scraped my knee up pretty bad. While getting the wound cleaned, I told the nurse it happened in the parking lot. The principal told my parents it happened on the playground. In hindsight, both are true, but from a parent’s perspective, I can now see how these are two distinctly different things and created some confusion at home that night. For years to come, this became a running joke in our family, “Did it happen in the parking lot or on the playground?”.

Those of you who have spent any amount of time chatting with me know that I have very strong feelings against “Reserve” wines. In my experience at other wineries, often times the “cream of the crop” was set aside for their reserve wines, much to the detriment of the quality of the remainder of their releases from that vintage. Heck, some wineries will just slap the label “Reserve” on every single bottle they release. After all, there is no guideline or legal jurisdiction over the use of that word in the US.

It’s always been my goal to make every varietal, every vintage, the best expression of our terroir.

 

 

So, let’s step back to the 2000 vintage. This was my 7^th year making wine from the family vineyard and I was just starting to really grasp the nuances that our different vineyard blocks bring to our finished wines. It was during fermentation of our Gate Block that I realized what a phenomenal Cabernet this was going to be. Typically, I barrel down our Cabernets to 50% new French oak, the rest of the wine going into once used French oak. I felt that putting this wine into 100% new French oak would really help showcase the intensity of this wine. As the wine developed and I started to assemble our 2000 vintage, I set myself upon the task. If I could set aside a few barrels of this Cabernet from our Gate block, pretend it didn’t exist, could I still make the quality as good as if those barrels were in the finished blend? After extensive trials, I realized that we could…so we did. However, I really didn’t want to tread into the world of “Reserve”. Instead, I did a “Dedication” on this Cabernet. This bottling was “dedicated” to the four most influential men in my life: my two grandfathers, my father, and our son Jerry, who was born in the year 2000. A club member of ours happened to be a trademark attorney and when she heard about this program, helped us earn our first trademark.

The following two vintages were amazing quality, but I just couldn’t get the magic of that 2000 Dedication as a single vineyard Cabernet. The tricky thing with trademarks, if you don’t continue to use it, you lose it.

 

 

Meanwhile, I had started experimenting with planting Cabernet Franc and Malbec on our property with the goal of someday creating a Bordeaux blend. The first vintage was to be 2003, but what to call it?

We had the trademark, it’s a pretty package, why not pivot and make Dedication the name of our blend? That’s what we did, and every vintage of Dedication from 2003 on has been our blend…it’s just the 2000 vintage that was the outlier.

I’m writing this today, as I made quite the discovery last week. It was a particularly warm July day, so I decided to straighten our library storage. Where we thought we only had 2 cases left of the 2000 Dedication, I discovered ten more, all aged perfectly in our “White Room”.

Those of you who are fans of Gate block have remarked about how lush and ageable this wine is, so I’m very excited to re-release this library wine. What a fun opportunity to experience a single vineyard designate Cabernet at the 25 year mark. We hope you enjoy this wine as much as we did making it!