2008 Paderewski Vineyard Block B

Epoch is a new project headed by owners Bill and Liz Armstrong. The estate is made up of three major holdings. The first is Paderewski vineyard, which the Armstrongs purchased in 2005 and re-planted with the help of Justin Smith of Saxum, who also serves as consulting oenologist. This 300+ acre holding once belonged to celebrated musician and politician Ignacy Paderewski, one of the early pioneers in Paso Robles. So far, all of the Epoch wines have been made from Paderewski, a relatively warm site. More recently, the estate added the 30-acre Catapult Vineyard, a cooler-climate site next to Booker Vineyard and purchased the York Mountain Winery, another historic site in Paso, that is currently undergoing renovations and that will become the estate's winemaking facility. Jordan Fiorentini runs the day to day winemaking. The wines are fermented with indigenous yeasts and bottled with no fining or filtration. Fiorentini found the 2008s in the cellar when she arrived in 2010. She finished the elevage and made the final blends. The 2009s I tasted suggest her style is a bit more finessed driven, although some of that may be attributed to the vintage. It will be interesting to find out. In 2008 the estate suffered through frost and drought conditions with very little rain, both of which resulted in low yields. The 2009s are the result of a season that was mostly cool, until heat spikes in August caused sugars to rise quickly. The estate brought in all of their fruit before the October 13 downpour.

Saxum's Justin Smith continues to consult here, and the new winemaker, who I tasted with this year, is 29-year-old Georgia native Jordan Fiorentini. In only-in-America fashion she wound up in the winemaking business via Dartmouth (Engineering Sciences, Italian and Art), followed by a Masters in viticulture and enology from UC/Davis. She was the winemaker at Chalk Hill from 2007 until June of this year and was a major part of that winery's dramatic turnaround (see IWC issue 150, May/June 2010) before landing here. This is a winery to watch.