2012 Bedrock Heritage Wine

Morgan Twain-Peterson has been joined at Bedrock by long-time friend Chris Cottrell, who formerly worked at one of New York's top wine retailers, Crush."This has taken an enormous amount of work and time pressure off me and allows even more attention to be paid to vineyards and cellar work," Twain-Peterson told me.Attention to crop loads was essential to real success in 2012, Twain-Peterson said, "especially with younger vineyards, where the vines went crazy if you let them--and high yields equal less depth and more fragile wines.But the grapes were so clean and just right that it was hard for a lot of growers to bring themselves to drop such great fruit."Full crop loads were less of an issue for the old-vine vineyards that produce fruit for Bedrock's Heritage bottlings, "which are self-regulated, yield-wise, by their extreme age."The red wines from 2012, added Twain-Peterson, "should be really good agers but they don't look like they'll ever truly close up because the tannins are so harmonious."He pointed to the aromatic complexity that many already exhibit as a good enough reason to enjoy these wines now without anxiety or guilt.

This is a fabulous set of wines from Morgan Peterson and Bedrock. Peterson has recently been joined by Chris Cottrell, who I met a few years back when he was selling wine at Crush, one of New York City's top retailers. As always, the focus at Bedrock is on California's heritage vineyard sites, many of which Peterson has brought back to prominence with the help of a small group of fellow producers, all of whom are focused on saving what are truly natural treasures. At their best, the Bedrock wines are intense and viscerally thrilling to the core, not to mention incredibly fairly priced in today's environment.