2015 Merryvale Chairman's Selection Red Wine

Winemaking

Merryvale’s Chairman’s Selection Red Wine is a Cabernet-based blend sourced from select hillside vineyards in Napa Valley. Every vintage, Winemaker Simon Faury looks for wine lots for this limited-production wine that demonstrate the unique characteristics of fruit grown at higher elevation. Handpicked, double sorted, then gravity-fed into tanks and fermented with native yeasts. We aged the wine for 22 months in 70% new French oak barrels from Sylvain and Ana Selection. The wine was bottled without fining or filtration.

Vintage

The 2015 growing season in started out with unseasonably warm temperatures in the late winter and early spring. This resulted in an early bud break and bloom. Colder temperatures in May caused uneven fruit set which resulted in a much smaller crop. The harvest was one of the earliest on record, beginning on July 22 with the picking of grapes for sparkling wine, and concluding for most in the valley by mid-October.

Tasting Notes

The 2015 Chairman’s Selection is a blend of some of our most interesting Cabernet lots. Every year we strive to showcase hillside vineyards that impress us with intensity and power. We look for depth and structure that is worthy of this special bottling. For this vintage, we included 5% Malbec from a mountain vineyard to add spice to the blend. Our goal for this wine is to maintain a beautiful mountain expression of Cabernet. With proper cellaring, this wine will drink beautifully for the next 10 to 15 years.

Blend: 95% Cabernet Sauvignon, 5% Malbec

Vineyards: Rancho Chimiles and Stagecoach vineyards

Cooperage: 22 months in 70% new French oak barrels from Allier; 30% once used

Alc: 14.9%

pH: 3.6

TA: 6.7 g/L