A drop-dead gorgeous wine teeming with brambly red fruit, earth, bay leaf, dried sage, and crushed graphite notes. Medium to full-bodied with an impressively dense mid-palate, ultimately serving as a prime example of how Napa’s abundant fruit in youth begins to mellow and find impressive integration as those ripe fruit flavours begin to permeate every inch of the wine, infusing it with warm, dark berry tones or calling to mind a drizzle of raspberry coulis, layered into rich earth and mineral notes all wrapped in a package of dried cigar leaves and housed in rich cedar. So expressive! Red Rock Terrace is an iron-rich, rocky 2.8-ha north-facing site on the Diamond Creek Estate. Today, the Diamond Creek estate is owned by the Rouzaud family, owners of second-growth Château Pichon Lalande in Pauillac and Château de Pez in St.-Estèphe and Champagne house Maison Louis Roederer. Frédéric Rouzaud, President of Maison Louis Roederer, leads all the icon companies of the Roederer Collection, which includes Roederer Estate, Domaine Anderson, Scharffenberger Cellars, and Merry Edwards in California’s Russian River Valley, to name a few. (JC)