Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022 - 39

Top 100 Wineries
WASHINGTON | WALLA WALLA VALLEY
L'Ecole Nº 41
L'Ecole Nº 41's 16th Top 100 nod comes at a time, more than ever, when
their regional identity is in tight focus.
MARCUS RAFANELLI
historically, l'ecole nº 41 has specialized
in regional wines of the Columbia Valley;
they've been making wine there since
little of the Valley was under vine. The
brand retains contracts at coveted vineyard
sites and makes outstanding, well-priced
Columbia Valley appellation wines. But the
top seven wines for L'Ecole this year come
from closer to home, the Walla Walla Valley.
Over the last 20 years, the winery's focus on
Walla Walla has reaped benefits, in large part
because of their investment in and commitment
to three important vineyards: Pepper
Bridge and Seven Hills, among the oldest
in the region, and Ferguson, set high on the
SeVein hill-a windswept site of exceptionally
thin, poor soils, rugged and rock strewn,
yielding some of the most challenging and
long-lived wines in Walla Walla. Each of
these vineyards inspires a single-vineyard
blend that is iconic in its expression of a
facet of Walla Walla terroir. -P.J.C.
2019 Walla Walla Valley Ferguson Vineyard
($70, 94 points) Marcus Rafanelli took charge
of winemaking in late 2019, just in time to bring
the cabernets and blends to bottle, including Ferguson,
L'Ecole's flagship. This year's blend (half
cabernet sauvignon, a quarter merlot, the rest
cabernet franc and petit verdot) reflects the vineyard's
basaltic hilltop intensity-you can smell
the rock in the glass. It's firm and powerful, delivering
tobacco, dark cherry and graham cracker-
sweet oak, saturated and mouthfilling, with a
gripping, scudding minerality.
FOUNDED:
1983
WINEMAKERS:
Marty Clubb and
Marcus Rafanelli
VITICULTURIST:
Sadie Drury
OWNER:
Marty Clubb
ACRES OWNED:
210
ANNUAL PRODUCTION:
47,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN:
33%
FARMING PRACTICES:
Sustainable/Salmon
Safe, certified by LIVE
2019 Walla Walla Valley Perigee Seven Hills
Vineyard ($57, 94 points) In 2019 Perigee
is half cabernet sauvignon, with the balance
merlot, cabernet franc, petit verdot and malbec.
It seems to be channeling the warm, windswept
essence of Seven Hills, the aromatics
lifted, full of dusty fruit and tobacco notes, the
flavors reflecting dark red fruit rendered spicy
and exotic by the hot, dry winds of the southern
Walla Walla hills-pure Walla Walla savor.
2019 Walla Walla Valley Cabernet Sauvignon
($40, 93 points) Walla Walla is undoubtedly a
warm place, yet cabernet here sits at the edge
of where it can ripen, reflecting an expression
of place that's paradoxically cool in its savor, its
scents of mint, tobacco and mocha, with a palpable,
edgy tension. Sourced in part from estate
vines at Ferguson and Seven Hills, this wine's
dark red fruits are marked by plenty of tobaccoscented
tannins. The wine, by the way, is a steal.
CALIFORNIA | SIERRA FOOTHILLS
Lava Cap
The soils and climate conditions at this high-elevation estate make Lava
Cap's wines some of the most distinctive in El Dorado County.
JOE NORMAN
DaviD Jones was a geologist for the Usgs
in Menlo Park before teaching at UC Berkeley,
retiring to cultivate vines in the mountains
high in El Dorado County, a ridgeline
with an anomalous soil composition he
found captivating. His son Charlie manages
the vineyard today, and has a geologic
bent all his own: the rocks here, he
says, are andesitic, the result of a lava flow
that settled into the property's streambeds
and remained as the rest of the mountain
receded. Rich in silica and potassium, the
soil is a bright-red Aiken loam, on a ridge
subject to late budbreak, late harvests, prodigious
diurnal shifts, and more sunlight
hours than any of its counterparts on the
coast. Joe Norman makes the wines, coming
to the Foothills by way of Heitz Cellar;
he brings what Charlie calls a classic, " oldschool "
sensibility to the property's wines.
We'd agree. It was evident in the Rhônevariety
wines, all of which excelled. Powerful
and nervy at once, they are clearly the beneficiaries
of the solar intensity of the site in
summer and cool temperatures in autumn,
when the fruit was able to retain acidity and
structure. -P.J.C.
2017 El Dorado Syrah ($25, 94 points) A powerful
wine, this has its share of syrah funk. It's
spicy and exotic, with cardamom, cocoa, cinnamon
and Mexican mole aromatics; the flavors
are dark and spicy clove, even a bit of animal
musk, delivered with an inky intensity and finegrained
tannins to ground all that feral energy.
FOUNDED:
1986
WINEMAKER:
Joe Norman
VITICULTURIST:
Emmett Jones
OWNERS:
Charlie and Noreen
Jones
ACRES OWNED:
102; 75 planted
ANNUAL PRODUCTION:
20,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN:
90%
2018 El Dorado Grenache ($25, 93 points)
Charlie Jones fusses over his grenache; he seeks
to steer clear of overripe jammy flavors, but also
to avoid picking early, which at this elevation
results in astringent tannins. This 2018 is tense
and concentrated, with exuberant flavors of red
cherry and strawberry, its red-fruited intensity
lifted by a lively acidity and a scudding, dusty
mineral grip that keeps it riveting and assertive.
El Dorado Mourvedre ($35, 91 points)
This wine is multi-vintage, as a family of bears
raids the vineyard each year, focusing their
appetites on the mourvedre block. " They seem
to have devised a system, " says Charlie Jones.
" They put their whole mouth over the cluster and
strip just the berries, leaving the bare rachis. "
You can see why the bears would like this
mourvedre, which makes a wine of brown-sugar
sweetness surrounding dark berry flavors, along
with scents of anise, pepper and tobacco.
Wine & Spirits - Fall 2022

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