2018 Grenache, Kimsey

Kimsey Vineyard

This has been a wild one.  One of the great things about owning a small winery is that you don’t have to follow any corporate guidelines or really follow any rules whatsoever.  I take that back…there are literally books worth of rules we must follow because we make alcohol.  What I mean to say is that sometimes (often) one can just sort of wing it and make some decisions that might not fit in the norms of a given industry. That’s partly what happened here.  This is a 2018 and it is a current release.  Hmmm.  For many different reasons this wine ended up spending a great deal of time in barrel.  Most of our red wines (and the industry standard) is somewhere between 11 and 18 months in barrel.  Sometimes Cabernet Sauvignon will spend two years in barrel but that’s about it.  This wine spent a whopping 55 months (4.5 years) in barrel!  Why?  Good question.  This was one of those wines that just never fit into place, until it finally did, in the Spring of 2023.  It had come across as tight and tannic for its first two years in barrel and seemed to be begging for more time to sort itself out.   Then came a worldwide pandemic.  Who knew.  More time in barrel.  Once the dust settled from that event, we were in the window but getting back in the bottling mode was difficult.  But we finally did, and I don’t think this wine suffered a bit.  On the contrary, I think it was just the amount of time necessary to bring out all the character it had to offer.  Pull a cork and see for yourself.  The aromatics are crazy and despite the long time in barrel the wine is very fresh and clean.  It’s a wee bit high in alcohol, so dive in cautiously.  All in all, I think it is one of the more compelling wines we’ve made, and I look forward to going back to it for many years to see how it’s developing.