"Wine is bottled poetry"
Robert Louis Stevenson
"Wine is sunlight, held together by water"
Galileo Galilei
But, yet again, I digress.
Today's wine is another Grape Creek offering. Their Cab Trois is a combination ofCabernet Sauvignon, Cabernet Franc and Ruby Cabernet. I've never heard of Ruby Cabernet. Maybe it's a new hybrid? According to the winery's tasting notes, there's also some Petit Verdot in the blend as well.
This is one of Grape Creek's more moderately priced wines. But, as I mentioned earlier, it's still pretty good.
It has a pretty garnet color--no, not ruby. Sorry. There's a little too much of a hint of rust color for that. It's light bodied, no noticeable tannins. Which might be a little disappointing, but I suppose that makes for a more quaffable wine.
All the Heath Family Wineries seem to be focusing on wines that are lower in alcohol content. Which, I guess is good. I don't drink to get drunk, so that means I can drink more wine. But I think it tends to make the wine taste a little flat.
That could just be me, however.
I could imagine drinking this wine around Christmas time. There's a lot of cinnamon and cedar on the nose, along with some sort of dark fruit. The tasting notes suggest black cherry or black current. I don't get that. I think it's more like very, very ripe blackberries. The soft kind that you eat straight off the sun-steeped vines and that-were it not for the seeds--would literally melt on your tongue. There's also (I think) a hint of leather.
The wine has a very soft mouthfeel with more than a hint of salinity. More than several hints, in fact. It's almost brackish. Which probably sounds horrible, but in reality is giving very strong hot summer night at the river vibes.
Ain't nothing wrong with that.
My main characters in Que Será, Syrah first meet each other on a hot summer night at the river. This was back when they were both teenagers, btw. She was drinking white wine and he was drinking beer, but I bet if they ever tried this wine, it would bring it all back to them, all the same.
Here's how it went:
Excerpt: I can’t recall now how we’d even found out about it. I know that I’d gotten a ride there with some friends and I imagine one of them had heard about it from someone else—who may have heard about it from someone else again. That’s how those things usually worked.
Other than the guys I came with, I didn’t know anyone there—they mostly looked like prep-school types to me, which was something that I very much was not. I’m also pretty sure we were trespassing on private property, because if we’d been on public land, the place would have been crawling with cops. Instead, it was just a bunch of kids—maybe three dozen in total, maybe four, maybe less than that. It was hard to tell exactly. We were outside at night and there wasn’t a lot of light to be had. People kept slipping away in groups of twos or threes, disappearing into the trees, or into the bushes that lined the dusty dirt paths, or into the backseats of nearby cars.
There was music coming from somewhere not too far in the distance (I had no idea from where. Perhaps a local festival? Or a house party?) and people were dancing. There was wine—a lot of wine, and not all of it labeled—because, again, it appeared that quite a few of the kids present had ties to wineries, and ready access to Napa’s most famous and ubiquitous commodity. There was some beer as well, and a few bottles of stronger stuff. Weed was only mostly legal, at that point. Not that it would have mattered, since we were all under twenty-one, as far as I could tell. But it was enough of a gray area that it was a safe bet that no one was going to come out and investigate the smell like they probably would have done a few years earlier.
The theme of the party was Midsummer. I do remember that, because someone (or maybe several someones?) had strung solar-powered twinkle lights all through the manzanitas that clustered around the riverbanks, prompting several of the girls to remark that it looked like fairyland, to which someone else (usually a guy, trying to sound knowledgeable) would respond that it was meant to, and then mumble something vague about Shakespeare.
My man-card was still pretty new at that point, so I wouldn’t have been caught dead saying anything about fairyland myself, but that didn’t stop me from thinking it, too.
I’d managed to snag one of the few bottles of beer and between that and the zaza I was feeling pleasantly crossfaded as I headed down a path that seemed to wander alongside the riverbank. And that’s when I saw her. She was humming to herself, dancing in the shallows, with her hands above her head and a bottle of wine clutched in one of them. Her hair was long and loose, curling nearly to her waist. It swayed from side to side following the movement of her head.
She was not exactly dressed to impress, in cut-off jeans and a graphic T. But I was impressed, all the same. Her legs were long, and the shorts were cut very short and the T-shirt hugged her breasts in a way that made the slogan stretched across her chest a little difficult to decipher; but I managed. “Sonoma Makes Wine,” I read silently. “Napa Makes Auto-Parts.” Wow. I figured it took a lot of guts to wear that shirt here in the heart of wine country. Either guts, or civic pride, perhaps? “Are you from Sonoma?”
Her eyes shot open. “No?” she said, sounding slightly confused. “Are you from Sonoma?”
“No, I’m from here,” I said, then added. “I mean, I’m from Clear Lake originally, but yeah, I’m…I’m local.”
“Clear Lake,” she repeated as she tilted her head to the side. “I’ve heard of it. It sounds pretty.”
I shook my head. “It’s not.”
“So, why were you asking about Sonoma if neither of us are from there?”
“It’s on your shirt,” I replied, gesturing at her chest.
She glanced down at herself and giggled. “Oh. That. Yeah, it’s great, isn’t it? I thought it was funny. Also, it pissed off my uncle, so…”
“So, that’s a good thing?”
“Uh…yes! Obviously.”
Except, of course, that since I had no idea who her uncle was, it had not been obvious. Nor did I care.
“He takes himself way too seriously,” she explained. But then she frowned and added, “Except, as it turns out, it also pissed off my cousins. And that was sucky. I definitely didn’t mean for that to happen. But it’s too late now. I’m committed, so...I can’t just back down.” She sighed and tipped the bottle to her mouth, dropping her head back, losing her balance as she did, and stumbling just a little.
“Hey! Um…why don’t you come out of the water before you fall?” I suggested, feeling a little worried as I suddenly remembered that a girl had drowned a few years ago, not that far from here, at a similar party.
Her eyes met mine. “Why don’t you come in the water,” she challenged. “We can fall together.”
Que Será, Syrah
Pour Decisions: Book Three
They may be keeping secrets and telling lies, but a little white wine never hurt anyone.
Allegra
It’s not every day that you inherit one-third of a winery. I should be on top of the world, floating on Cloud Wine, as they say. Instead, don’t you just know it? I’m about to make one of the biggest mistakes of my life. And that’s saying something. My family has always viewed me as something of a screw-up, not always fairly. But in this case? They’re not only dead right about me messing things up; they don’t even know the half of it. Yet.
Complicating my quest to redeem myself, earn my sisters’ respect, and help them turn our winery into a straight fire success, is my low-key relationship with Sheriff’s Deputy Clay Romero. Sure, there are risks involved in sleeping with the enemy, but ‘what’s meant to be will find a way,’ right? And whether Clay believes it or not, I know we’re fated. With a capital F.
Clay
We’re Capital F somethin’ all right; but I don’t think it’s fate. Ever since Legs (AKA Allegra Martinelli) blew back into town, I’ve been flirting with disaster. Literally. I doubt that woman’s ever met a rule that she didn’t want to at least bend. And, as luck would have it, it’s my job to try and stop her. I love my job, and I think I love her. But there’s not enough wine in Napa to convince me that I’ll be able to hang on to them both.
Legs keeps likening us to Romeo and Juliet. And as I keep trying to remind her; that kind of story tends not to end well. I’m sure there are exceptions, but are we gonna be one of them? I guess we’ll find out.
Releasing May 27, 2025
