2011 Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley

I was also able to taste a bottle of the 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley, which comes from a more challenging, cool year. It has a solid perfume of ripe red and black fruits, truffly earth, graphite, and tobacco. With medium to full-bodied richness and beautifully resolved tannins, it's clearly in its prime drinking window yet still youthful, with another 10-15 years of prime drinking. While Quilceda Creek has had some substantial changes in their winemaking team over the past few years, with both Alex Steward and Hal Overson departing to work at Matthews, it certainly hasn’t affected the quality, and 2021 is going to go down as one of the all-time great vintages for this estate.

Lovely aromas of black and purple fruit, tobacco leaf and sage. Full-bodied with fine, smooth tannins that are soaked in ripe, dark fruit. So much complexity and intensity here. Focused and structured, with a guiding note of black and red currant. Suede and coffee. Very long finish.

The 2011 Cabernet Sauvignon is the first of the 20-year vertical to show soft herbal notes with sage and bay leaf elements, as the fruit condition begins to shift from lively and youthful fruit tones to more mature tones of dried black and dark red fruit in the glass. Medium to full-bodied, the wine is beginning to go through the change with still-firm tannins and a juicy, ripe essence of fruit. The 2011 is an outlier of sorts, since, in this vintage, Quilceda Creek suffered a major loss to many of its Cabernet blocks at Champoux Vineyard, forcing them to seek out and outsource other fruit in 2011. Luckily the Wallula Vineyard had quality Cabernet to offer, and the rest is history.