MARIN ARTS & CULTURE 23
Caymus Rhymes
with Famous
Wine & Spirits
Tasting notes:
2012 Mer Soliel Silver Unoaked Chardonnay A surprisingly high level of complex, focused, fruit and acidity. This is an excellent choice for chardonnay lovers who like a robust wine without the wood.
2013 Mer Soliel Reserve Chardonnay Santa Lucia Highlands
Lovely and elegant with long lasting flavors and beautifully integrated acidity.
2012 Conundrum white wine blend This has always been an interesting and delicious wine with a touch of muscat to give it a wonderful nose. A perfect picnic wine if you like very special picnics.
2012 Belle Glos Pinot Noir, Los Alturas, Santa Lucia Highlands Amazingly smooth and silky fruit in this unique wine with lots of acidity to assure good ageing potential. The vineyard is located at a high altitude.
2013 Belle Glos Pinot Noir, Clark & Telephone, Santa Maria Valley Lovely balance and soft tannins make for exceptional enjoyment. This vineyard is planted to the famous “Martini” clone.
2012 Emmolo Merlot, Napa Valley Very rich fruit—a merlot that will surprise you with it bountiful taste—a wine that you can chew!
2012 Caymus Cabernet Sauvignon Napa Valley “40th Anniversary”
Our tasting group loved and loved this wine. Superb fruit intensity with great balance. The taste is so good it made us close our eyes and sigh! And that was in the middle of
the day!
2011 Caymus “Special Selection”
It certainly is “special”--a bit more serious than the Napa Valley wine with more aging potential.
I
by Ed Schwartz
-I ’s an easy way to remember how to
pronounce this famed Napa Valley
winery and a most felicitous one. This winery’s flagship offering, “Special Selection” cabernet sauvignon, is world famous—Wine Spectator magazine named it the Number 1 wine in the world twice for its 1984 and 1990 vintage—a unique achievement and the wines were that good! And, unlike so many of today’s French and Napa cult wineries that price their wines at nosebleed levels, “Special Selection” also is one of the finest wines for the price in the world; the 2011 vintage is priced around $130 a bottle and can hold its own—and then some—with any cabernet-based wine anywhere at any price.
Caymus is about the Wagner family, notably Charlie and his son, Chuck. The first time I met Charlie was at the winery on a nice, summer day many years ago. He asked why I had come to visit and I told him that I wanted to talk to his son, Chuck, about doing public relations work for the winery. His response was to take me around the property and picking a large bag of fruit for me to take home. He impressed on me that fruit was good for me. How farmer-like. The fruit was great and, happily, I did work for Caymus for many years.
Charlie was a farmer by trade as was his father. Charlie had been making some homemade wine that the legendary Andre Tchelistcheff and others liked. That was the turning point from fruit farmer to winemaking star. So, in late 1971. Charlie and his wife, Lorna Belle Glos Wagner, asked their son, Chuck, who had recently graduated from high school, if he would be interested in joining them in starting up a winery. If Chuck declined the offer, Charlie and Lorna were planning to sell their land in the Napa Valley and move to Australia. Chuck accepted his parents’ offer to launch Caymus.
The Wagners took the name Caymus from the Mexican land grant known as Rancho Caymus, given to George Yount in 1836, which encompassed what eventually became the town of Rutherford and much of the surrounding area.
The Wagners produced their first vintage in 1972, consisting of 240 cases of cabernet sauvignon. Since then, Caymus has focused its efforts on the production of quality cabernet sauvignon, but the family has added other fine varieties along the way under the Wagner Family of Wine. But nothing along the way was easy. The Wagners worked extremely hard to fashion a great brand during those early days when money was short.
Caymus Vineyards remains 100% family-owned by the Wagners. Charlie, Lorna Belle, and Chuck worked together as a remarkable team for over 30 years, building Caymus. Today, Chuck, his two sons, Charlie and Joe, and one daughter, Jenny, have joined the family team. Youngest daughter, Erin, can often be found working in different parts of the winery, as she finds her path. Farming grapes remains the priority with the family owning about 350 acres of choice Napa Valley land along with other excellent parcels outside Napa.
Before tasting the wines of Caymus, a word or two about cabernet sauvignon, one of the greatest of wine stars. The variety was known in the 17th century under several different names, but the origin of the grape was not known. Finally, in 1996, Dr. Carole Meredith at UC Davis and her team of DNA experts traced the grape back to a chance cross- pollination between cabernet franc and sauvignon blanc, a genetic surprise. Wines from cabernet sauvignon are not only prized for taste, but also for ease of cultivation, hardy vines, consistency of taste expression—full bodied, high acidity and good aging potential.