Picked in the aftermath of a spring frost from which some vines took three years to fully recover, the Tamarack 2004 Cabernet Sauvignon mingles fresh and distilled evocations of cherry and purple plum with salted nuts, black tea, and prominent piquancy of fruit pit. The combination of juiciness and salinity in this wine’s long finish offers both intrigue and mouthwatering savor. “If you could make a good wine in 2004, it showed you really knew how to make wine,” remarks Coleman, “because it took a lot of making.” Clearly he passed that test with flying colors, and this is likely to retain its virtues for at least another couple of years.
At the risk of embarrassment, I must admit that the establishment of veteran Ron Coleman – whose right-hand, winemaker Danny Gordon, has been with him practically since the winery opened in 1998 – was so unfamiliar to me that I had merely requested he send a couple of wines for one of my massive March blind tasting sessions. After tasting nearly two hundred wines solely by number, I was anxious to peel the brown bag back from two standouts, both of which proved to be from Tamarack. It was one of those very rare occasions when I was running ahead of schedule and had more than an hour to kill before my next appointment, which was dinner. “Hey, isn’t this winery one of the many in the old Air Field facilities across the highway?” I asked my fellow-tasters – three critics and distinguished veterans of the Washington scene – assuming, correctly, that one or more of them would have Coleman’s number. He was there, so we postponed dinner and I got a head start enjoying a vast array of wines and lore, returning in July for further tasting, including a vertical of Tamarack’s Cabernet blend. The affable and astute Coleman has cultivated what are clearly close relationships with some of Washington’s finest grape growers and is crafting wines not only stylistically elegant, distinctly delicious and (where single-vineyard, as some are each year) manifestly site-specific, but profoundly cellar-worthy and generously-priced. Customers also benefit from his willingness – even after his wines have typically enjoyed 22 months’ elevage – to give them a year or more in bottle prior to release. Speaking of barrel time, Coleman’s wines experience as much as 75% new oak for their first year, yet it never stands out as such, a phenomenon he suggests might be attributable not only to his choice of coopers (which I, too, approve, though I won’t name names), but also to his proclivity – after fermentation in small tanks with extraction solely via a sparing regimen of punch-downs – to press-off at anywhere from 2-8% sugar, letting his young wines go to barrel without settling to finish their primary fermentation. Finished alcohol in virtually all of the wines I tasted ranged from 14.2-14.6%.
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