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Wine Description
The Story
Cariad, the Welsh word for “love”, is a Bordeaux-style red wine blended from three outstanding vineyards owned and managed by David Abreu. Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, and Cabernet Franc from Madrona Ranch are blended with small amounts of fruit from Thorevilos and Howell Mountain, producing a wine of enormous proportions with a classic structure that is the Colgin hallmark: a plethora of vibrant aromas, voluptuous at mid-palate, with impeccable balance and an exceptionally long finish. A wine as seductive as its name.
Wine Information
The wines of 2014 have an immense sense of purity. The mild weather of the 2014 vintage produced wines with sophistication that beautifully balance elegance with true power. The superbly delineated flavors are both fresh and fully ripe. A harmonious quality is apparent in the suave texture of these wines. The 2014 vintage seductively draws you in, then piques your curiosity and keeps you returning repeatedly for more. The 2014 season followed the unseasonably dry 2013 vintage and began with one of the driest Januarys in recent history. It wasn’t until February came that we received the bulk of our wet weather. Despite all the references to a drought, what perhaps made an even bigger imprint on the 2014 season was the warmth we experienced in the winter. As both factors combined we began one of the earliest growing seasons since 2005. As spring and summer unfolded, we saw marginally warmer temperatures all year long and yet we experienced very few heat waves.
The vines set a beautiful crop, and it was no surprise that 2014 led to one of our earliest harvests, beginning on August 29th. Berries were plump and fresh as they were harvested. As the wines evolved in the cellar, we observed how their flavors span a broad spectrum- from powerful dark fruits, to classic and subtle Napa Valley herbal and earth notes, reminiscent of an earlier era. With their silky textures developing over the course of the fermentation, we extracted the wines using longer, slower macerations, adding to their nuance and length. The 2014 vintage comes in a sequence of stellar vintages. Following the classic structure of the 2012 and the concentrated nature of the 2013 vintages, the 2014 stands apart from its predecessors in that it captures the supple dense qualities of a warm vintage, married with the perfumed characteristics of a cooler vintage. Such qualities harken back to great vintages like 2005, and even further back to the age worthy 1995, as witnessed in our 1995 Colgin “Herb Lamb.”