Wine & Spirits - Winter 2020 - 37

Rose & Arrow

Stag's Leap
Wine Cellars

OREGON | WILLAMETTE VALLEY
Rose & Arrow wines are designed from the ground up, built
around the subterranean discoveries of geologist Pedro Parra.

FELIPE RAMIREZ

MARK TARLOV AND LOUIS-MICHEL LIGER-BELAIR
founded Chapter 24 in 2012, basing most of
their output on two wines-Fire, channeling the
volcanic terroirs of the Willamette Valley, and
Flood, grown in soils left by melting glaciers at
the end of the last Ice Age. When, in 2014, Tarlov invited Chilean wine geologist Pedro Parra to
consult for the brand, his discoveries could not
be contained in the old model. Parra began to
deconstruct Oregon's underground, isolating the
edges of lava ﬂows at different moments in their
evolution from rock to soil. The more attention
he paid, the more variations he found in places
once thought to be uniform. In 2015, Chapter 24
launched Rose & Arrow, focused on wines that
live in these margins, built from vineyard sectors
determined not by row or aspect but by subterranean logic. Felipe Ramirez, who worked with
Liger-Belair and Parra in Burgundy, has been
the winemaker on the ground since 2016, taking
over fully since Liger-Belair left the team in 2019.
He uses ambient yeasts to ferment the wines,
and does not ﬁne or ﬁlter them. "I have to listen," he says of his effort to keep ego out of the
process. "The amount of information from each
vineyard is amazing. Each tank is like an ecosystem of place."-P.J.C.

CALIFORNIA | NAPA VALLEY
Marcus Notaro's epic 2017s celebrate the 50th
anniversary of Stag's Leap Wine Cellars.
MARCUS NOTARO

THE 2017 VINTAGE IN NAPA VALLEY WAS a season
of extremes. After years of drought, a winter
of drenching rain brought a burst of energy to
plants throughout the valley and into the hills.
Then the heat came, peaking at 106˚F on September 2. According to Marcus Notaro, who
had known only drought since he started making the wines at SLWC in 2013, the Fay Vineyard, planted on an ancient creek bed with vine
rows tracking the sun from east to west, was hit
harder by the heat spikes than S.L.V., the vineyard Warren Winiarski had planted on the bench
of the Stags Leap Escarpment and higher up
into the hillside. He recalls that most of the lots
that made it into the 2017 Fay were still resting
with their grape skins when wildﬁres took out
the winery's electricity on October 8. Notaro had
to ﬁnd "creative cooling and fermentation techniques," as the cooling system had stopped functioning. "I drained off a couple of these tanks by
gravity, with ﬂashlights and no power, the day
after the ﬁre," he recalls. The unusual conditions
created a different relationship between the two
estate vineyards as he set out to blend Cask 23, a
wine that has combined the best characteristics
of both vineyards since 1990. -J.G.

2018 Eola-Amity Hills Hopewell Hills Gathered
Stones Pinot Noir ($150, 96 points) Studying the
soils at Hopewell Hills, Parra found a lot of vesicles-
tiny bubbles in the fractured basalt. He believes the
vesicles help optimize the nutrient pathways from the
soil to the vine roots. In fact, that ground provides a
wine of stunning complexity and fulsome ﬂavor. Its
aromas are reminiscent of an Indian bazaar-cardamom, garam masala, ginger, chai, and spiced
cacao-earthbound and compelling.
FOUNDED:

2012
OWNERS:

Mark Tarlov,
Ian Lombard
WINEMAKER:

Felipe Ramirez
VITICULTURISTS:

Netanya Welch,
Pedro Parra
consulting
ACRES OWNED:

155 (long lease)
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

1,800 cases
ESTATE GROWN:

100%

FOUNDED:

2018 Dundee Hills Worden Hill Pinot Noir ($75,
94 points) This estate vineyard is the remnant of
an ancient landslide in the Dundee Hills, the rock
still weathering into soil. This wine is simple and gorgeous, all smoke and earthy red dust, dark plum and
black cherry, with the feel of a leather glove warmed
by sunshine.

2017 Napa Valley Fay Cabernet Sauvignon ($150,
95 points) Fay is usually the austere sibling to S.L.V.
In 2017, between the early reserves of water in the
soil and September's extreme heat, those lean
curves turned voluptuous. It's an elegant beauty,
svelte, with complexity that pours out long after each
taste. If the wine Warren Winiarski tasted from Fay in
1969 was anything like this, it's easy to understand
why he bought the land next door. (3,140 cases)

1970
OWNERS:

Ste. Michelle
Wine Estates,
Marchesi Antinori
WINEMAKER:

Marcus Notaro
VITICULTURIST:

2018 Dundee Hills Worden Hill 1st Red Dust
Pinot Noir, ($150, 94 points) Pedro Parra isolated
this pocket of basalt loam, a mélange ﬂecked with
pebbles, for a "First Expression" from Worden Hill.
The wine's dark-plum ﬂavors are limned with cigar
box notes, opening toward a nutty, walnut skin savor.
The texture is suave and completely seductive, the
wine a burst of cherry ﬂavors seen through a walnut
sepia tone.

Top 100 Wineries

Kirk Grace
ACRES OWNED:

2017 Napa Valley Cask 23 Cabernet Sauvignon
($295, 95 points) This vintage of Cask 23 has a cool
concentration that speaks more of spring than of the
late August heat. The blend is 52 percent from S.L.V.
and 48 percent from Fay, aged almost two years in
new French oak barrels. The tannins are rich, the
aroma smoky, but the bright liveliness of the ﬂavor-
the persimmon, cherry and fresh tobacco-shines
through. (2,500 cases)

262
ANNUAL
PRODUCTION:

140,000 cases
ESTATE GROWN:

100% for S.L.V.,
Fay and Cask 23

2017 Napa Valley S.L.V. Cabernet Sauvignon
($195, 93 points) The rocky hillside soils of S.L.V.
produced a dark and savory cabernet in 2017, with
peppery intensity, and youthful ﬂavors of blackberries
highlighting the dark-chocolate succulence of the tannins. (2,096 cases)
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