From a site adjacent to Cold Creek, Columbia Crest's 100% varietal 2009 Cabernet Sauvignon Wautoma Springs Vineyard Reserve features a delightfully pungent and savory meld of blond tobacco, powdered ginger, creme de cassis, candied cherry and salted caramel. There is a bit of heat and tannic roughness here but is well-enough integrated, and the combination of spice and (despite far-gone ripeness) energy in the finish is admirable. This should be worth following for several years. Columbia Crest is a 2.5 million-case outgrowth of behemoth Ste Michelle, sharing fruit from Cold Creek, and based amid enormous riverside acreage not far from Ste Michelle's Canoe Ridge Three decades old, this winery is dedicated to a very distinctive style of wines that are treated according to a different methodology, inter alia involving assemblage prior to barreling down to do malo, and in the reserve wines the completion of primary fermentation in barrel. A native of Mendoza, Juan Munoz Oca joined the team here in 2003 and became head winemaker in 2011. His long-time predecessor in that position and only the second to hold it, Ray Einberger - now officially Winemaker Emeritus - thus had final say in the making of many of those wines I tasted on this occasion. "I'll be happy," notes Oca modestly but displaying confidence, "if at the end of my tenure nothing has dramatically changed in how people look at Columbia Crest." The winery portfolio is broken into three distinct groups: a so-called Grand Estates tier of inexpensive Chardonnay, Cabernet, and Merlot based on fruit from the Horse Heaven Hills and Wahluke Slope; an -H3- label based on fruit of those same three varieties from Alder Ridge, McKinley Springs, and Coyote Canyon in the Horse Heaven Hills; and a reserve tier featuring various blends that receive long elevage in all or nearly-all new barrels. Confitured fruit and prominent caramelized resin from (a hundred thousand!) barrels - even the inexpensive Cabernet gets one-third new wood, both French and American - are common denominators for most of the wines I tasted, and I am sure there are tasters for whom the styles here - especially in the reserve tier - will hold greater appeal than they did for me. And I could only recommend, modestly, a few of the whites I tasted. Even so, there are some imposing results in the entire Columbia Crest line-up, including some remarkable values.Tel. (509) 875-2061