2005 Vintage Winemaker’s Notes

With 2005 being the inaugural vintage for GTS Vineyards, we weren’t exactly sure how this was going to work. The vineyard consists of two exposures planted to two clones of Cabernet on each hill. The big hill consists of clones 191 and 7 while the little hill contains 337 and 7. The two exposures ripened about 10 days apart. When the wines first went to barrel, it became obvious we had two very different wines on our hands. Blending in January of 2007 only confirmed this. The big hill wine, later to be called GTS, had a much blacker hue and more completeness to the palate. Now in the bottle, the GTS Vineyards wine is a much deeper, more brooding wine then the GTS Nancy’s Fancy. The fruit profile begins with black and purple fruits of dark cherry, plum, pomegranate, and cassis. The wine’s structure reflects its Diamond Mountain origins with additional notes of smoke and graphite helping to prolong the finish. The GTS Nancy’s Fancy, from clones 337 and 7, runs toward the redder side of the Cabernet spectrum. The clone 337 contributes a brighter cherry, stone fruit character that runs throughout the wine. The wine overall lacks the depth and complexity of the GTS bottling but more than makes up for it with its drinkability and fruit forward character. We weren’t necessarily setting out to bottle two different wines but we believe two wines to be the best expression of the vineyard for this particular vintage.

Thomas Rivers Brown