2023 Chesebro, Las Arenas, Grenache/Syrah, Cedar Lane Vineyard, Arroyo Seco AVA, Monterey County.
Made by the father and son team of Mark and Will Chesebro, this exciting Rhône inspired Las Arenas Cedar Lane Vineyard is a fabulous vintage influenced wine with deep fruit concentration and bright vitality, showing of loads of spicy character and any array of dark berry flavors. This is like and Monterey version of Gigondas with a medium bodied palate of boysenberry, plum, cherry and tart blueberry fruits, along with a white pepper kick, briar, mountain sage, fennel, mocha and dark floral notes supporting the core fruit perfectly. The year was long and cool, developing lots of complexity, supple tannin, savory tones and retaining good acidity, with this Las Arenas coming at a moderate 14.2% natural alcohol, making it a finely balanced and quaffable wine. The Chesebro family Cedar Lane label is a serious collection of quality offerings, including crisp Albarino, Sauvignon Blanc, Vermentino whites, as well as Pinot Noir and Rosé, plus this well crafted blend. In recent years, there has been a few surprises too, like a Gamay and a impressive Cabernet Sauvignon, from their Carmel Valley estate, so it is a great time to discover and explore these wines.
The Chesebro’s Cedar Lane Vineyard is located in the Arroyo Seco River drainage area on the eastern side of the Santa Lucia Range, just to the west of the town of Greenfield in Steinbeck country in the Salinas Valley. The soils here, as the Chesebro’s explain, are predominately sandy with prominent amounts of granite cobble stones dotting the rows and this cool breezy vineyard has a strong diurnal shift that encourages ripening while maintaining acidity and freshness. The grapes are all hand harvested and fruit is fully de-stemmed and left to start fermentation naturally, but with a selected culture added to ensure an easy fermentation completion. Will Chesebro adds that after an approximately 10 day maceration the wine is pressed off to barrel, mostly neural French oak with approximately 20% new. This Las Arenas Grenache/Syrah, after the best part of 12 months of barrel aging, was bottled unfined and unfiltered, all to promote clarity and allow for all the terroir and vintage nuances to show through. There’s a lot to admire in the current set of releases from Chesebro and while the single varietal bottlings are very popular locally, I do suggest checking out this Las Arenas, which really showed nicely in a blind tasting of old world and new world Rhône wines!
($30 Est.) 93 Points, grapelive