Feature Article
The View from Eaglepoint extends far beyond Mendocino’s borders
The appeal of one of Mendocino’s most recognized vineyards has winemakers from all over coming to Mendocino to get a piece of that Eaglepoint terroir.
by
Thom Elkjer
November 9, 2005
Eaglepoint Ranch offers a sweeping vista that takes in hundreds of square miles, from Sonoma County to Humboldt County and west across the mountainous breadth of Mendocino County. The visual spectacle alone is impressive -- the Ukiah Valley is a 1000-foot plunge below you, while the Mayacamas Mountains soar up another 1000 feet behind you.
Yet as a vineyard, Eaglepoint Ranch offers a perspective that goes well beyond its geography. In many ways, the place illustrates the figurative peaks and valleys of the wine business for all of Mendocino County. One on hand, it’s rugged, independent, true to itself, and producing some seriously good wine. On the other hand, it’s serving the ambitions of people outside the county as much as or more than Mendocino itself -- a syndrome that has long bedeviled the county’s wine industry.
The men behind the vineyard were cut from completely different cloth, which just happened to knit together perfectly.
John Scharffenberger is known to most of us for his ubiquitous Scharffen Berger Chocolate, which he and his partners sold to Hershey this summer. Before that he created Scharffenberger Winery, which he sold to French Champagne interests in 1992. Before those two ventures, he planned, planted, and managed Eaglepoint Ranch beginning in 1975. Today the university-educated entrepreneur has a Tuscan-style villa on an estate in bucolic Anderson Valley and enough wealth to do what he wants.
Casey Hartlip is a self-described “redneck” who never went to college. He met Scharffenberger while helping out on a controlled burn at Eaglepoint Ranch in 1977 as a firefighter with the California Department of Forestry. Scharffenberger asked him to help with the grape harvest after the summer fire season was over, and Hartlip obliged that year and next. After the 1979 harvest, he stayed on fulltime. When Scharffenberger founded his sparkling winery in 1981, Hartlip became the vineyard manager at Eaglepoint Ranch and remains in that position today.
The two men -- both tall, well-built and affably wry -- seem to have formed a mutual admiration. “John’s a genius,” Hartlip says. “He could grow fruit on the moon.” Scharffenberger says that “the hand-off to Casey could not have been better. He’s producing exactly what I envisioned for that vineyard thirty years ago: great fruit that speaks for itself.”
This is not just the pot calling the kettle bright. Eaglepoint Ranch really is different from most vineyards. The 1250-acre ranch has just 82 acres of vineyards in more than a dozen small blocks laid out on gentle slopes that sit out from the mountain side like the abundant thighs of a matronly lap. There are plenty of wine companies that would have 500 acres growing up there if they owned it. But Scharffenberger’s vision was formed at Stony Hill in Napa Valley, where he worked as a college graduate in 1972, and in Europe, where he traveled years before that. He wanted small, sloping blocks with a maximum of personality and a minimum of disruption to the environment.
The result is a startling mix of old and new, high and low, dense and open. Some vines go back to the 1970s and 1980s, some blocks are just a few years old, and some are bare earth ready for replanting. In some blocks, the rootstocks have had two or three different grape varieties grafted onto them. Petite Sirah, a mainstay in the vineyard since its early days, is spaced and trellised three different ways in three different blocks. Some of the spacing and trellising schemes have been out of fashion for nearly a generation, but they survive here because good, consistent fruit comes first.
The grape varieties in the vineyard also reflect changing times. Alongside heritage grapes such as Zinfandel, Syrah, Petite Sirah and Grenache are more recent arrivals Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon. The next planting, of Counoise, reflects today’s rage for Rhône varieties.
“We have a living history of Mendocino viticulture in this vineyard,” Hartlip said one day last spring, while we were walking through a Grenache block hit hard by inclement weather. When I return to this block shortly before harvest, the vines seem to have shrugged off their early damage and turned in a small but creditable crop after all. Hartlip is not surprised. “We don’t panic. We don’t push [the vines]. We just come out every day and work with what we see and feel.”
This low-key, values-based approach to grape-growing is, in many ways, emblematic of Mendocino County. Many vineyard owners are private individuals rather than corporate interests. By and large, they farm the way they want to farm (including the highest percentage of organic vineyard acres of any county in California). Most of the time, they don’t care to expand beyond where they are today.
This might sound like a recipe for sleepy, backwater wine grapes, but if Eaglepoint Ranch is any guide, that would be the wrong conclusion to draw. From the earliest harvests, well-known wineries were making Eaglepoint Ranch vineyard-designated wines, and that has continued right down to today.
“I was an early believer that the big wines would come from the higher-elevation hillside properties,” recalls Paul Dolan, who was a young winemaker at nearby Fetzer Vineyards when Eaglepoint Ranch was planted. He began buying the fruit for Fetzer and eventually was purchasing 90% of the vineyard’s production. “Eaglepoint benefits doubly from its elevation because of temperature inversions with the valley floor. This keeps things cool and helps the grapes mature more slowly. And while the site has good drainage, the red clay soils seem to have enough water-holding capacity to release moisture to the vines slowly, which enhances sugar and flavor development.”
Even as Scharffenberger relied on Dolan’s employer, Barney Fetzer, for advice and yearly grape purchases, he and Hartlip worked hard to establish Eaglepoint Ranch as a source of artisanal grapes for smaller, higher-end wineries. “The goal was to escape the Fetzer orbit and sell to boutique wineries instead,” Hartlip says, “and that’s still pretty much the plan today.”
It seems to be working. For this story I blind-tasted nearly 20 wines (see Thom’s Wine Notes) that specify Eaglepoint Ranch on the label, made by respected (not to mention collectable) producers such as Copain Wines , Navarro Vineyards, Rosenblum Cellars, Sean Thackrey, and Eaglepoint Ranch Winery (which is owned by Hartlip and Scharffenberger, but legally separate from the vineyard). All are full-flavored, generous wines with plenty of stuffing, yet they are also nicely balanced and, for such big boys, very well behaved.
Wells Guthrie’s first wine from Eaglepoint Ranch, a 1999 Syrah, racked up national raves and sent his fledgling Copain Wines into “must-have” territory in a hurry. He’s been buying grapes from the vineyard ever since. “The vines are not over-cropped or over-farmed, and the fruit is always on an even keel,” he says. “That consistency gives me more freedom to experiment in the winery, because the fruit quality is not this huge variable like it is in some vineyards.”
Bolinas-based Sean Thackrey makes a Sangiovese from Eaglepoint Ranch, called ‘Aquila,’ that made me wonder why the rest of California has all but given up on the grape. It’s big and lush, well structured but not too tannic, and beautifully balanced for a massive wine. He’s been making wine from Eaglepoint Ranch since the 1997 vintage, and currently bottles both the Sangiovese and his ‘Sirius’ (an Eaglepoint Ranch Petite Sirah). “When I first tasted the fruit in the vineyard I realized it would suit my style,” Thackrey recalls. “Nine vintages later, that’s still true. They keep turning out what I’m looking for.”
This year, the Eaglepoint Ranch customer base includes 18 different wineries (not counting Eaglepoint Ranch Winery), and the majority of them are outside Mendocino County. While this represents success for the vineyard, it’s a sign of continuing frustration for Mendocino as a whole. Most vintners here estimate that two-thirds of Mendocino wine grapes leave the county when harvest is over. Some of this fruit, like the stuff that goes into Eaglepoint Ranch vineyard-designates, winds up in a bottle with a Mendocino appellation identified on the label. The vast majority, however, disappears into wine that, officially at least, comes from somewhere else.
Take Sonoma, right across the county line. It’s packed with more fashionable appellations such as Dry Creek, Alexander Valley, Russian River Valley, and Sonoma County itself. Wineries there can boost their production by nearly one-sixth without changing the appellation on the label, simply by buying fruit from somewhere else and blending it in below the 15% threshold permitted under federal labeling laws. That extra fruit sure as heck isn’t coming from Napa, but a whole lot of it is coming from Mendocino.
Everyone agrees that the way for Mendocino to build its own reputation and keep that fruit at home is to attract more wineries. Those wineries would also attract more visitors, creating a virtuous cycle of reputation, quality and demand. Furthermore, it’s clear that Eaglepoint Ranch is the perfect centerpiece for such a strategy: it’s sizable, it’s well known, and its grapes are good enough for those other name-brand places.
So why don’t Scharffenberger and Hartlip rev up their winery (it produces only 1,200 cases a year now), sell themselves all the Eaglepoint Ranch fruit they want, and create a new high-end wine brand based in Mendocino? By all accounts, the reason they started the winery ten years ago (it was called Lonetree then) was to prove that the vineyard could produce serious wine. Why not extend that to the grape-growing region where the vineyard is based?
Once again, this question touches on changes in the county as a whole. New money is flowing in, with plenty of business savvy behind it and significant goals in front of it. When Dolan left Fetzer last year, he quickly teamed up with deep-pocketed newcomers Tom and Tim Thornhill to form Mendocino Wine Company. With this vehicle, they have bought and are turning around Ukiah’s Parducci Wine Cellars while creating a slew of new brands. Doug and Ana Stewart have traded their San Francisco-based Howler organic ice cream company and Noe Valley flat for Breggo Cellars, a new winery they are building in Boonville. Other wineries and tasting rooms are going up in other parts of the county as well.
So perhaps it should not have come as a complete surprise when Roland and Barbara Wentzel, owners of the Bay Area’s Traditions chain of home furnishing and decorating stores, bought Eaglepoint Ranch last April. The Wentzels were investors in Scharffen Berger Chocolate, and they had already planted vineyards on property they own in Mendocino’s Anderson Valley. They had a significant sum of cash to reinvest after sale of an asset, and the Scharffenberger family was seeking a sale to smooth inheritance issues after the death of John’s father.
The Wentzels, like many Bay Area entrepreneurs, have worked in other fields and lived overseas, so they bring a broad perspective to their local projects. They also have a successful retail business already, so unlike most well-to-do people who split time between the city and the wine country, they are not hot to be known as winery owners. While they have purchased a 25% stake in Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, they are not rushing to expand it to help change the county’s lackluster reputation.
“The brand we invested in is Eaglepoint Ranch, not Mendocino County,” Roland says with genial finality. In his view -- he’s a PhD agricultural economist, by the way -- the purpose of Eaglepoint Ranch Winery is to demonstrate the quality of the vineyard’s grapes to potential customers, and it’s doing that just fine.
It turns out that the Wentzels have a different agenda for Eaglepoint Ranch, one that seems more in keeping with the county’s traditional values than its upscale future. “We embraced the original vision of the winery, which is to offer good wine at affordable prices,” Barbara explains to me in the living room of their sun-splashed Philo home. “If we expanded the winery, that would take significant capital and we would probably have to raise prices,” Roland adds.
Instead of making a point with the winery, the Wentzels appear much more interested in making their points through the vineyard itself. Like many vineyards in Mendocino, Eaglepoint Ranch is relatively isolated and benefits from good water drainage and continuous air circulation. These attributes tend to dramatically reduce pest problems and thus the need for toxic remedies. But Eaglepoint Ranch, again like many Mendocino vineyards, has never been certified organic. Expect that to change.
“The statement we want to make is about the land and stewardship,” Barbara says, her passion evident. “Certifying the vineyard as organic would demonstrate that sustainable practices are fully compatible with high quality and consumer appeal.”
While achieving organic certification would take a minimum of three years, she has already made a difference on the ground. When Hartlip showed me the new Cunoise block he had prepared for planting, he pointed out that it could have been seven acres instead of four if just a few mature oaks had been removed. “Barbara said there was no need to fatten her wallet at the expense of the land, so we left the trees where they were and modified the vineyard instead,” Hartlip explains.
When I ask him about taking the vineyard organic, he responds that he would jump at the chance. Then, without prompting, he imagines the wines of Eaglepoint Ranch Winery in a future vintage, with labels that say “Made from Organically Grown Grapes.” He guns his truck up a steep, oak-shaded dirt road between vineyard blocks and grins broadly. “Now that,” he says, “would make a statement.”
It appears Eaglepoint Ranch is destined to become a brighter beacon for Mendocino after all.
- Thom Elkjer, Mendocino Editor
The following are the Eaglepoint Ranch wines that I tasted in preparation for this story, along with my tasting notes for each. All wines were blind tasted.
~TE
Yet as a vineyard, Eaglepoint Ranch offers a perspective that goes well beyond its geography. In many ways, the place illustrates the figurative peaks and valleys of the wine business for all of Mendocino County. One on hand, it’s rugged, independent, true to itself, and producing some seriously good wine. On the other hand, it’s serving the ambitions of people outside the county as much as or more than Mendocino itself -- a syndrome that has long bedeviled the county’s wine industry.
The men behind the vineyard were cut from completely different cloth, which just happened to knit together perfectly.
John Scharffenberger is known to most of us for his ubiquitous Scharffen Berger Chocolate, which he and his partners sold to Hershey this summer. Before that he created Scharffenberger Winery, which he sold to French Champagne interests in 1992. Before those two ventures, he planned, planted, and managed Eaglepoint Ranch beginning in 1975. Today the university-educated entrepreneur has a Tuscan-style villa on an estate in bucolic Anderson Valley and enough wealth to do what he wants.
Casey Hartlip is a self-described “redneck” who never went to college. He met Scharffenberger while helping out on a controlled burn at Eaglepoint Ranch in 1977 as a firefighter with the California Department of Forestry. Scharffenberger asked him to help with the grape harvest after the summer fire season was over, and Hartlip obliged that year and next. After the 1979 harvest, he stayed on fulltime. When Scharffenberger founded his sparkling winery in 1981, Hartlip became the vineyard manager at Eaglepoint Ranch and remains in that position today.
The two men -- both tall, well-built and affably wry -- seem to have formed a mutual admiration. “John’s a genius,” Hartlip says. “He could grow fruit on the moon.” Scharffenberger says that “the hand-off to Casey could not have been better. He’s producing exactly what I envisioned for that vineyard thirty years ago: great fruit that speaks for itself.”
This is not just the pot calling the kettle bright. Eaglepoint Ranch really is different from most vineyards. The 1250-acre ranch has just 82 acres of vineyards in more than a dozen small blocks laid out on gentle slopes that sit out from the mountain side like the abundant thighs of a matronly lap. There are plenty of wine companies that would have 500 acres growing up there if they owned it. But Scharffenberger’s vision was formed at Stony Hill in Napa Valley, where he worked as a college graduate in 1972, and in Europe, where he traveled years before that. He wanted small, sloping blocks with a maximum of personality and a minimum of disruption to the environment.
The result is a startling mix of old and new, high and low, dense and open. Some vines go back to the 1970s and 1980s, some blocks are just a few years old, and some are bare earth ready for replanting. In some blocks, the rootstocks have had two or three different grape varieties grafted onto them. Petite Sirah, a mainstay in the vineyard since its early days, is spaced and trellised three different ways in three different blocks. Some of the spacing and trellising schemes have been out of fashion for nearly a generation, but they survive here because good, consistent fruit comes first.
The grape varieties in the vineyard also reflect changing times. Alongside heritage grapes such as Zinfandel, Syrah, Petite Sirah and Grenache are more recent arrivals Sangiovese and Cabernet Sauvignon. The next planting, of Counoise, reflects today’s rage for Rhône varieties.
“We have a living history of Mendocino viticulture in this vineyard,” Hartlip said one day last spring, while we were walking through a Grenache block hit hard by inclement weather. When I return to this block shortly before harvest, the vines seem to have shrugged off their early damage and turned in a small but creditable crop after all. Hartlip is not surprised. “We don’t panic. We don’t push [the vines]. We just come out every day and work with what we see and feel.”
This low-key, values-based approach to grape-growing is, in many ways, emblematic of Mendocino County. Many vineyard owners are private individuals rather than corporate interests. By and large, they farm the way they want to farm (including the highest percentage of organic vineyard acres of any county in California). Most of the time, they don’t care to expand beyond where they are today.
This might sound like a recipe for sleepy, backwater wine grapes, but if Eaglepoint Ranch is any guide, that would be the wrong conclusion to draw. From the earliest harvests, well-known wineries were making Eaglepoint Ranch vineyard-designated wines, and that has continued right down to today.
“I was an early believer that the big wines would come from the higher-elevation hillside properties,” recalls Paul Dolan, who was a young winemaker at nearby Fetzer Vineyards when Eaglepoint Ranch was planted. He began buying the fruit for Fetzer and eventually was purchasing 90% of the vineyard’s production. “Eaglepoint benefits doubly from its elevation because of temperature inversions with the valley floor. This keeps things cool and helps the grapes mature more slowly. And while the site has good drainage, the red clay soils seem to have enough water-holding capacity to release moisture to the vines slowly, which enhances sugar and flavor development.”
Even as Scharffenberger relied on Dolan’s employer, Barney Fetzer, for advice and yearly grape purchases, he and Hartlip worked hard to establish Eaglepoint Ranch as a source of artisanal grapes for smaller, higher-end wineries. “The goal was to escape the Fetzer orbit and sell to boutique wineries instead,” Hartlip says, “and that’s still pretty much the plan today.”
It seems to be working. For this story I blind-tasted nearly 20 wines (see Thom’s Wine Notes) that specify Eaglepoint Ranch on the label, made by respected (not to mention collectable) producers such as Copain Wines , Navarro Vineyards, Rosenblum Cellars, Sean Thackrey, and Eaglepoint Ranch Winery (which is owned by Hartlip and Scharffenberger, but legally separate from the vineyard). All are full-flavored, generous wines with plenty of stuffing, yet they are also nicely balanced and, for such big boys, very well behaved.
Wells Guthrie’s first wine from Eaglepoint Ranch, a 1999 Syrah, racked up national raves and sent his fledgling Copain Wines into “must-have” territory in a hurry. He’s been buying grapes from the vineyard ever since. “The vines are not over-cropped or over-farmed, and the fruit is always on an even keel,” he says. “That consistency gives me more freedom to experiment in the winery, because the fruit quality is not this huge variable like it is in some vineyards.”
Bolinas-based Sean Thackrey makes a Sangiovese from Eaglepoint Ranch, called ‘Aquila,’ that made me wonder why the rest of California has all but given up on the grape. It’s big and lush, well structured but not too tannic, and beautifully balanced for a massive wine. He’s been making wine from Eaglepoint Ranch since the 1997 vintage, and currently bottles both the Sangiovese and his ‘Sirius’ (an Eaglepoint Ranch Petite Sirah). “When I first tasted the fruit in the vineyard I realized it would suit my style,” Thackrey recalls. “Nine vintages later, that’s still true. They keep turning out what I’m looking for.”
This year, the Eaglepoint Ranch customer base includes 18 different wineries (not counting Eaglepoint Ranch Winery), and the majority of them are outside Mendocino County. While this represents success for the vineyard, it’s a sign of continuing frustration for Mendocino as a whole. Most vintners here estimate that two-thirds of Mendocino wine grapes leave the county when harvest is over. Some of this fruit, like the stuff that goes into Eaglepoint Ranch vineyard-designates, winds up in a bottle with a Mendocino appellation identified on the label. The vast majority, however, disappears into wine that, officially at least, comes from somewhere else.
Take Sonoma, right across the county line. It’s packed with more fashionable appellations such as Dry Creek, Alexander Valley, Russian River Valley, and Sonoma County itself. Wineries there can boost their production by nearly one-sixth without changing the appellation on the label, simply by buying fruit from somewhere else and blending it in below the 15% threshold permitted under federal labeling laws. That extra fruit sure as heck isn’t coming from Napa, but a whole lot of it is coming from Mendocino.
Everyone agrees that the way for Mendocino to build its own reputation and keep that fruit at home is to attract more wineries. Those wineries would also attract more visitors, creating a virtuous cycle of reputation, quality and demand. Furthermore, it’s clear that Eaglepoint Ranch is the perfect centerpiece for such a strategy: it’s sizable, it’s well known, and its grapes are good enough for those other name-brand places.
So why don’t Scharffenberger and Hartlip rev up their winery (it produces only 1,200 cases a year now), sell themselves all the Eaglepoint Ranch fruit they want, and create a new high-end wine brand based in Mendocino? By all accounts, the reason they started the winery ten years ago (it was called Lonetree then) was to prove that the vineyard could produce serious wine. Why not extend that to the grape-growing region where the vineyard is based?
Once again, this question touches on changes in the county as a whole. New money is flowing in, with plenty of business savvy behind it and significant goals in front of it. When Dolan left Fetzer last year, he quickly teamed up with deep-pocketed newcomers Tom and Tim Thornhill to form Mendocino Wine Company. With this vehicle, they have bought and are turning around Ukiah’s Parducci Wine Cellars while creating a slew of new brands. Doug and Ana Stewart have traded their San Francisco-based Howler organic ice cream company and Noe Valley flat for Breggo Cellars, a new winery they are building in Boonville. Other wineries and tasting rooms are going up in other parts of the county as well.
So perhaps it should not have come as a complete surprise when Roland and Barbara Wentzel, owners of the Bay Area’s Traditions chain of home furnishing and decorating stores, bought Eaglepoint Ranch last April. The Wentzels were investors in Scharffen Berger Chocolate, and they had already planted vineyards on property they own in Mendocino’s Anderson Valley. They had a significant sum of cash to reinvest after sale of an asset, and the Scharffenberger family was seeking a sale to smooth inheritance issues after the death of John’s father.
The Wentzels, like many Bay Area entrepreneurs, have worked in other fields and lived overseas, so they bring a broad perspective to their local projects. They also have a successful retail business already, so unlike most well-to-do people who split time between the city and the wine country, they are not hot to be known as winery owners. While they have purchased a 25% stake in Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, they are not rushing to expand it to help change the county’s lackluster reputation.
“The brand we invested in is Eaglepoint Ranch, not Mendocino County,” Roland says with genial finality. In his view -- he’s a PhD agricultural economist, by the way -- the purpose of Eaglepoint Ranch Winery is to demonstrate the quality of the vineyard’s grapes to potential customers, and it’s doing that just fine.
It turns out that the Wentzels have a different agenda for Eaglepoint Ranch, one that seems more in keeping with the county’s traditional values than its upscale future. “We embraced the original vision of the winery, which is to offer good wine at affordable prices,” Barbara explains to me in the living room of their sun-splashed Philo home. “If we expanded the winery, that would take significant capital and we would probably have to raise prices,” Roland adds.
Instead of making a point with the winery, the Wentzels appear much more interested in making their points through the vineyard itself. Like many vineyards in Mendocino, Eaglepoint Ranch is relatively isolated and benefits from good water drainage and continuous air circulation. These attributes tend to dramatically reduce pest problems and thus the need for toxic remedies. But Eaglepoint Ranch, again like many Mendocino vineyards, has never been certified organic. Expect that to change.
“The statement we want to make is about the land and stewardship,” Barbara says, her passion evident. “Certifying the vineyard as organic would demonstrate that sustainable practices are fully compatible with high quality and consumer appeal.”
While achieving organic certification would take a minimum of three years, she has already made a difference on the ground. When Hartlip showed me the new Cunoise block he had prepared for planting, he pointed out that it could have been seven acres instead of four if just a few mature oaks had been removed. “Barbara said there was no need to fatten her wallet at the expense of the land, so we left the trees where they were and modified the vineyard instead,” Hartlip explains.
When I ask him about taking the vineyard organic, he responds that he would jump at the chance. Then, without prompting, he imagines the wines of Eaglepoint Ranch Winery in a future vintage, with labels that say “Made from Organically Grown Grapes.” He guns his truck up a steep, oak-shaded dirt road between vineyard blocks and grins broadly. “Now that,” he says, “would make a statement.”
It appears Eaglepoint Ranch is destined to become a brighter beacon for Mendocino after all.
- Thom Elkjer, Mendocino Editor
The following are the Eaglepoint Ranch wines that I tasted in preparation for this story, along with my tasting notes for each. All wines were blind tasted.
~TE
- Copain, Grenache Mendocino County - Eaglepoint Ranch 2003
The effusively sweet, richly floral aromas and flavors emphasize rhubarb, red plum and spice; this is not Copain’s biggest wine but it’s a very well balanced one with good texture, expansive aromatics in the mouth, layers of dark fruit and spice opening up past the midpalate, and excellent persistence in the finish. Really complete wine. - Copain, Syrah Mendocino County - Eaglepoint Ranch 2002
Rich dark ruby color, aromas of earthy red raspberry and dark cherry; the berries and cherries stay earthy in the soft, spreading texture, balanced by incisive acidity and good general juiciness. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Grenache Mendocino County 2003
Brick to garnet in color; overt oak, ripe strawberries, celery, green onion tops and white pepper aromas give way to a perfectly pitched package of strawberry and plum flavors, grippy texture and medium body that rides lightly on rails of acid and tannin to a refreshing finish. Well made wine. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Grenache Mendocino County 2004
Grenache’s signature garnet color and peppery strawberry sweetness in the aromas; even sweeter in the mouth, but the wood dries the fruit past the midpalate, leaving the acid and alcohol to heat the finish. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Petite Sirah Mendocino County 2003
Inky dark ruby color: concentrated, seamless, jammy ripe boysenberries and red raspberries in the aromas and flavors; the soft fruity attack turns firmly structured as wood tannins seize your palate and the wine layers in cloves and allspice. Best after 2008. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Sangiovese Mendocino County 1999
Well-made older wine, all knit together, more than the sum of its maturing, mellowing parts; late in the finish is a poignant echo of youthful fruit -- beautiful moment. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Syrah Mendocino County 2001
Good dark ruby; the aromas are earthier and more mushroomy than the dark red and black fruit flavors, and the oak dominates at first, but good acid ensures general juiciness and the ripe fruit wins through to the finish. May benefit from an hour in the decanter. - Eaglepoint Ranch Winery, Syrah Mendocino County 2002
Rich dark ruby color and beautifully balanced aromas of fruit, spice, earth and oak: plush, sweet blueberries and black plums in your mouth with plenty of body and weight to carry the tooth-coating tannins. One juicy steak of a red wine. - Edmeades, Zinfandel Mendocino - Eaglepoint Ranch 2000
Dry black cherries, moist turned earth and baking spices -- nice combo; in the mouth, a flood of dark fruit, with vibrant baking spice and earthiness, the acidity bracing through the plushness and a good touch of tannin late. - Girasole, Syrah Mendocino County - Eaglepoint Ranch 2001
Smells like sweet red licorice with a Kalamata olive and whole clove in it; no olive in your mouth, but the sweet red fruit and spice remain, the structure is understated yet firm and the glide to the finish is long and shimmery. Entertaining wine. - Navarro, Cabernet Sauvignon Mendocino 1999
Classic Cab combo of red fruit, green pepper, and dry forest floor; the aromas become flavors, and there's some medicinal (cough syrup) quality too that some may find appealing. Excellent length, nice smooth texture, really easy-drinking Cabernet. - Rosenblum, Zinfandel Mendocino County - Eaglepoint Ranch 2002
Juicy dark fruit, cedar leaves, cigar box, and Belgian chocolate; aromas become flavors, the texture, body and weight are all opulent, the finish a full return to the fruit. Less oak than Rosenblum usually uses – and a very successful wine because of it. - Sean Thackrey, "Aquila" Sangiovese Mendocino - Eaglepoint Ranch 2000
Multi-layered aromas and flavors of sappy, licorice and bold red fruit with cherry candy sweetness; big body and palate weight, the oak is sweet and well integrated, and the fruit character is nicely mountainous and cedary in the finish. Makes you wonder why California Sangiovese isn’t more successful. - Sean Thackrey, "Aquila" Sangiovese Mendocino - Eaglepoint Ranch 2002
Baking spices and cinnamon sparkle on the nose, over black cherries and plums; in your mouth, a flood of sweet fruit and abundant puckery tannin that hold a warm embrace far into the finish. Needs some time to meld the flavors and soften the tannin – but that 15.7% alcohol isn’t going to go anywhere. - Sean Thackrey, "Sirius" Petite Sirah Mendocino County - Eaglepoint Ranch 2002
Inky dark ruby in color; vivid sweet red raspberry aromas with earth and oak become flavors; the texture is super but the fruit is muted now and the oak a bit obvious – the wine’s in a dumb phase that should pass by 2007 or so.
