Tasting notes: Promontory wines

Currently, winemaker Cory Empting makes just one wine from the Promontory estate. It’s Cabernet Sauvignon, but as with the Harlan Estate and Bond wines, no grape variety or appellation is identified in the label — Napa Valley Red Wine, they’re all called. (All three of Bill Harlan’s wineries make exclusively Cabernet Sauvignon-based wines.) The Promontory winery is bonded to make over 50,000 cases of wine, but Empting aims to max out at around 6,000.

As vineyard manager Mary Maher and her team develop a deeper understanding of the vineyard over time, they plan to make component wines, separating different segments of the property into individual cuvees. Eventually, Empting says, he’d like to classify different sites within the vineyard according to a grand cru and premier cru system, but he’s in no rush: “We don’t want to ring a bell we can’t unring.”

Empting considered Promontory’s 2008 effort, which was never released commercially, an experiment. Maher’s team came on after the growing season was already under way, and the farming wasn’t yet to their standards. It tastes like mountain, not hillside, fruit, with chewy, rough-hewn tannins. It’s brambly and red-fruited, with sweet blackberry and graphite flavors and density on its mouthcoating finish. A likable wine, but harsh.

Two vintages later, the 2010 effort steps more quietly onto the palate. Though it was a little bit closed when I tasted it, it was obviously more polished, with silkier tannins, than the 2008. It shows barbecued meat, tobacco and iron, and keeps to a tight, unyielding structure.

The 2013, the current release, shows the fat, rich friendliness typical of its vintage in Napa: both plumper and brighter than the 2010, oozing layers of juicy black fruit, if lacking some of the taut structure of that earlier wine. Powerful, grippy with cocoa-powder tannins, charcoal and smoke.