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Vinum The Scrapper

Year

2008
Varietal

Cabernet Franc
Style

Bold
Origin

United States
Pairing

Meat
$30.00 $25.50 per bottle
Qty: 

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Origin
This wine comes from the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains in El Dorado County, along the eastern edge of California. An underappreciated and perhaps underexploited terroir, this area presents great winemaking promise but has not yet been deeply explored, except by locals and a few ambitious wine prospectors from California’s more celebrated counties. Bright sun, high elevation and famously red, volcanic soils define the terroir here, which relies on mountain elevation for the cool air that coastal California gets from the Pacific.
Pairings
It’s a common trope that big red wines deserve big red meat, and this Cabernet Franc is no exception. Indeed, This wine will flourish in combination with fire-grilled ribeyes, succulent marinated lamb chops, herb-crusted pork shoulder and all of their meaty brethren. But its gorgeous ripe red fruit and inky depths will also enhance the flavors of fresh, pungent herbs, dry-cured olives, and concentrated marinades and reductions.

Serve at cool room temperature (64°F)
Winemaker
Vinum wines are the joint project of former Don Sebastiani & Sons winemaking whizz Richard Bruno and his buddy Chris Condos, who became friends while studying at the University of California’s prestigious oenology program in Davis. The two share a willingness to sleuth out great grapes in obscure regions, along with a fondness for rich, emphatic reds. Both of those attributes are on display in this bottling, made from Cabernet Franc, a grape native to France’s Loire Valley. There, wines made from it are often herbal, light and tart; this plush, fruity example shows what happens to the variety in abundant California sunshine.
The Wine
Cabernet Franc generally lives in the shadow of Cabernet Sauvignon, even though it is the genetic parent (with Sauvignon Blanc) of the more famous red wine. For this lack of notoriety, Bruno and Condos call this wine The Scrapper. As they say, it’s “made for the open-minded, the adventurous and those who root for the underdog.” Aged in used French oak for 22 months, the wine is concentrated and intense, yet somehow not weighed down. Brambly black currant fruit leads the way, with elements of vanilla, smoke, tobacco, licorice and dark chocolate along the edges.

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