Spending a late morning sampling 2023 and 2024 barrels at Mount Alto is pretty much my ideal reason to wake up on a Sunday. I mean, great wine and great people, it’s a Guaranteed Good Time!
Mount Alto recently released the 2021 Tributary, a red blend that is the inverse blend of the 2021 Manteo-Nason, the Tributary is 60% Petit Verdot and 40% Cabernet Sauvignon. This was a very small release, with only ten cases produced, and as such, I order six bottles upon receipt of the e-mail. It just took me a while to pick them up. Fortunately, I did order early because it is now all gone. I love that people are enjoying their wine, I just need them to leave me enough to stay well-supplied please, ok?
I got to the vineyard as they were wrapping up an overnight stay there with friends (see above about great people – looks like they had a ton of fun!). I joined Camila, David, and Robert to sample from the barrels with their friends.
As they’ve taken full control of production, they now have four barrels of wine and several carboys aging in their winery building. We started with the 2023 Manteo Nason blend in the barrel (check out my previous experience with it)- co-fermented and aged Cabernet Sauvignon and Petit Verdot. I got to taste this a little less than a year ago, and it was big and incredible (I think I recall saying it should be released as is right away at the time!). It is currently undergoing some malolactic fermentation in the barrel. I had been wondering whether the 2023 had been bottled yet, and learned that the 2022 vintage is also still in barrel, but is likely to get bottled over the winter. This wine may well wait in barrel until the fall of 2025 and then get bottled. I’m very anxious to sample the 2022 as their fifth vintage, it’s the only one I haven’t tried. Yet.
I’d say the 2023 sample was wound up pretty tight when I tasted it. It’s still tannic, but the boldness I recalled has faded. It’s still got great structure, but my overall sense, given where it is in its development, is that it would need air and warmth to open up and fully show itself. There was a lot of tart cherry coming through right now, but given time we’d no doubt find other fruit notes in this wine. Wine always changes in the barrel – the end of 23 barrel sample was not showing me cherry at all, and now here we are. Given time this will make greater shifts as moves to bottling and then settles into its identity.
We moved to the 2024 Merlot that the team purchased from Grace Estate Winery – they bought this fruit during this growing season to start learning from it and consider how they’d want to incorporate Merlot in their blend. They’ve previously talked about planting some on the site. It’s in a new French Oak barrel right now and also came across as pretty tight (it has not been in there for long!) but everyone agreed that they got some blueberry pie out of it. We’re in for a real treat as the Mount Alto team thinks about this as a blending partner for the grapes grown on site.
We moved on to the 2024 wine aging in neutral oak – it was harvested mostly before and in the middle of the heavy rains we recently received here in Central Virginia from hurricane remnants passing through. It’s finished the primary fermentation and is now sitting in the barrel, contemplating malolactic fermentation. We compared this with the exact same Cabernet Sauvignon/Petit Verdot blend in a smaller new oak barrel right next to it. The oakey intensity was shocking – it did feel like two very different wines with the oak influence on it. As expected, much stronger tannin and astringency from the wine aging in new oak. The Mount Alto team intend to play with blending these to determine the profile they want this vintage to show the world. How much oak will it take to make the perfect 2024 Manteo-Nason blend? We will see…
It’s exciting to see their operation fully functioning as they have two vintages in barrel on site now. They’ve come quite a long way as their operation matures and develops. It wasn’t that long ago that there wasn’t a production facility on site!
I was particularly thrilled that they chose this morning to sit down and test out a bottle of the 2020 Tributary, which is almost all Petit Verdot (maybe a few splashes of Cabernet Sauvignon as it sat in barrel to top it off now and then). This is unreleased, and they tossed around potential dates for release. This wine was so sensitive to both temperature (it was like 35 degrees overnight) and oxygen contact. The first sips were very unclear and carried only hints of what I know as Petit Verdot. After warming the glass in my hands and letting it air, it really opened up.
I wonder whether there is a characteristic to the 2020 vintage here that is at play – the 2020 Manteo Nason generally presented as knotted up right upon open and pouring, and needed one to two hours in decanter, after which it showed up as a gorgeous, complex wine. This has the same component Petit Verdot, is that nuance merely something that we need to expect from cooler year Petit Verdot on this site? This is what I love about Virginia Wine – the flavor profile of the wine is heavily dependent on site and vintage conditions (wet v dry, cool v hot etc). Making low-intervention wines in Virginia allows the winemaker to truly showcase unique characters of site and season.
Anyway, we chatted and thoroughly enjoyed the 2020 Tributary. I gave Rob a bottle of Hark’s 2019 Petit Verdot for his birthday, since I enjoy sharing awesome Petit Verdot with people who appreciate this grape!
One favorite moment of the day was when one of their friends shared that he follows this blog (I mean, who doesn’t, right?).
Remember, if you want to check out Mount Alto, they’re in a handful of small wine shops (Wine Guild in CVille, Bottle Thief in Richmond), and you can always make an appointment by reaching out to them through their website. It’s not a venue, there is no tasting room, but if you’re cool, they’ll hang out and chat with you for a while and sip some incredible wines. Watch their site and social media because they do a few cool tastings in Richmond, Charlottesville, and a few other spots, and they’re quite a hoot to spend time with.
As we’re coming into the home stretch with Virginia Wine Month, this was an awesome thing to do – try some barrel samples and an unreleased wine on the site where it’s grown. It’s one of the great things about Virginia Wine that we get to interact with the people making incredible wine in these small batch places. In many other wine-making regions, these wineries are a larger scale big deal and you’d rarely if ever get the chance to hear directly from the owners, growers and makers about their philosophy and goals. But in Virginia, we get this chance to connect and see through the winemakers’ eyes what is happening. We get to learn so much and taste a great wine at the same time.
And that’s what makes it fun.
Speaking of fun, check these out. Get at least one or two.
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