2021 Storybook Mountain Vineyards, Zinfandel, Eastern Exposures, Estate Grown, Napa Valley.
The impressive and sensual 2021 Storybook Mountain Vineyards Eastern Exposures Zinfandel, always one of my favorite Napa Valley wines, is beautifully aromatic, complex, deeply fruited and nicely structured with some mountain intensity, making this vintage very compelling stuff. This deep garnet and ruby edged Zinfandel shows off brambly black raspberry, plum, currant and cherry fruits in an elegantly layered wine with a smooth underlying backbone of tannin, plus a core of nice acidity, along with briar spices, a heightened sense of floral aromatics, sage, anise, cedar and a touch of vanilla. Coming in at around 14.5% natural alcohol, the 2021 Eastern Exposures Zin by the Seps family, which saw a small percentage of co-fermented Viognier, feels balanced from start to finish. As per normal here at Storybook, and not unlike Turley, the Zinfandel is organically farmed, hand harvested and native yeast fermented, 100% de-stemmed, and aged in a combination of mostly used American and French oak barrels for about 15 months. I was thrilled to taste through the Storybook Mountain Vineyards wine with owner and winegrower Jerry Seps recently, who I hadn’t seen in a long while, and I was delighted with the few 2019s and 2021s that I tried, I highly recommend these latest releases.
The historic Storybook Mountain Vineyards, which dates back to the late 1800s, was founded in modern times by Jerry Seps and his wife Sigrid in 1976 when they discovered and bought a ghost winery, with true winemaking caves and discarded vineyards, which he worked tirelessly to restore and replant, focusing on Zinfandel and Bordeaux varietals. Located a few miles North of Calistoga at the top of Napa Valley on beautifully positioned eastern facing slopes of the Mayacamas Mountains, on ridges that separate the Napa and Sonoma Counties. This site provides their vines a unique terroir and micro climate, with iron rich red clay and loam soils, and are conditions that makes these Storybook Mountain Vineyards wines their distinctive character and structure. Over the years, the Seps have made this one of the most desirable collection of California wines out there, joining the likes of Biale, Turley, Ridge, Bucklin, Lamborn and Bedrock to name a few, that Zinfandel enthusiasts can’t resist. As mentioned, the Storybook Mountain Vineyards has seen a change in generation, with Colleen Seps, Jerry’s daughter taking over the cellar and now leads the winemaking efforts here, which almost seamlessly transitioned with Collen continuing the style here with her wines. The generational change here at Storybook Mountain Vineyards has brought a lot of new excitement to a long time favorite and I look forward to following their efforts well into the future.
($60 Est.) 94 Points, grapelive