Diamond Mountain Cabernet - This Is No "Diamond in the Rough"
Nearly 40 years after staking her future on methode champenoise sparkling wine and the historic Schramsberg Diamond Mountain estate, Jamie Davies and her son, Hugh, have released an estate-grown Bordeaux varietal to compliment Schramsberg's seven sparkling cuvees. The first bottles of the 2001 J. Davies Diamond Mountain Estate Cabernet Sauvignon were sold to collector and top bidder Gary Rieschel at the 2004 Napa Valley Wine Auction.
Ten years after planting Schramsberg's Diamond Mountain vineyards to Cabernet Sauvignon and Malbec, Hugh and Jamie Davies released the 2001 J Davies Cabernet Sauvignon. The first lot of the initial 548-case production was purchased at the 2004 Napa Valley Wine Auction by top bidder Gary Rieschel of Mobius Ventures in Palo Alto who may have made auction history when he joyously (and generously) invited the entire Davies family to join him in Yellowstone the following summer to break open the first bottles of the prize lot.
Roughly double the size of the first year's production, the 2002 J Davies Cabernet Sauvignon was premiered last month at an exclusive on site offering for the Schramsberg Cellar Club. It is now available from the winery (www.jdavies.us) and through Wilson Daniels Wine Brokerage.
Although sparkling wine is sometimes trivialized, I have heard Hugh Davies privately express his conviction that greater care and expense is invested in the making of Schramsberg's seven cuveés than in even the most revered Napa Valley Bordeaux varietals. With this discipline and tradition in place, it follows that the Davies and their winemaking team would spend an intense decade on vineyard trials and research before the first release of a wine named for the beloved family patriarch Jack Davies.
It is worth noting that the history of this wine actually began in 1862 with the planting of the first Schram vineyard, Napa 's first hillside vineyard. The nearby McEachran vineyard was planted in 1878. Today, Hugh Davies, his wife Monique and their son Emerys live in the original McEachran residence overlooking that vineyard. Jamie Davies lives up the road in the home Jacob Schram built.
Nothing informs like familiarity. Hugh Davies was born on this wooded mountainside, explored it as only a young boy could and then worked alongside his family and a vineyard and cellar crew who have been with this winery nearly from the start. He watched his family commit all its resources to resurrecting the Schramsberg Vineyards and Cellars with a goal of making world-class méthode champenoise sparkling wines.
Family albums include snapshots of the Davies boys, barely tall enough to hold a shovel, helping to plant the first grapevines as the Davies replaced the historic vineyard with Chardonnay and Pinot Noir. Over the course of the next 30 years, their pursuit of the finest sparkling wine fruit led them to the cooler coastal areas of the Carneros, Anderson Valley and the Sonoma/Marin Coast.
This made the Davies Diamond Mountain land, the southernmost vineyards
in the Diamond Mountain District AVA, available for what the Davies had
learned was the highest and best use, the planting of Cabernet Sauvignon.
Flanked by two cool creek canyons and surrounded by dense forest, the
vines in these 33 vineyard blocks produce late-ripening, richly concentrated
fruit. The average yield is 2 tons per acre. The wines are unrefined and
unfiltered.
