2010 BOND Quella

The sister winery to Harlan made wonderful, distinctive wines in 2010. The Quella is powerful, rich and savoury.

The 2010 Quella is a candidate for perfection. From the lower foothills of Pritchard Hill, it offers up notes of charcoal, graphite, espresso and copious quantities of blueberry and black raspberry liqueur, along with distinctive minerality, a full-bodied mouthfeel, moderately high tannins, gorgeous richness and a long, moderately tannic finish. Forget it for five years and drink it over the following three decades. To quickly summarize this project that has been remarkably successful since the debut vintage, Bond is the project of the visionary Bill Harlan, the proprietor of Harlan Estate. Along with winemaker Bob Levy and consulting enologist Michel Rolland, he continues to sign 20-year leases on highly regarded vineyards planted with 100% Cabernet Sauvignon from which he offers consumers world-class Cabernet Sauvignons that showcase different Napa microclimates/terroirs. In short, there are five separate vineyard sites in the Bond portfolio. The Melbury comes from a seven-acre parcel (sedimentary and clay soils) on steep slopes in the Pritchard Hill area near Lake Hennessey, east of Rutherford. The northern most parcel, the Pluribus comes from a high elevation (1,000 feet) site on Spring Mountain. It, too, is a seven-acre parcel planted in the white volcanic bedrock called tufa. The most southerly situated vineyard is Vecina (11 acres planted at 200- to 330 foot elevation), which is a neighbor of Harlan Estate in the Oakville Corridor, on the western hillsides of Napa. St. Eden, a valley floor vineyard, is composed of 11 acres on gentle foothills just north of the Oakville Crossroads. The Quella Vineyard is a nine-acre site in the eastern foothills of St. Helena with an interesting terroir of alluvial pebbles and small rocks of what is believed to be an old riverbed. White tufa can be found as well. Part of the objective is to vinify these wines in identical manners so that as they age their microclimate/terroir characters become more pronounced. The barrels that are deemed not worthy enough to go into the individual single-vineyard wines are blended into the Matriarch cuvée.

Good bright ruby-red. Knockout perfume of black raspberry, violet, mocha and raspberry. Sweet, fine-grained and creamy on entry, then a bit drier and more backward on the back end. The wonderfully rising finish features substantial broad tannins but calls for patience.