2011 Zinfandel (Dry Creek Valley)

Mike Officer's recent purchase of the Mueller winery facility and surrounding property just outside Windsor has set him up to expand production to 10,000 cases from his current 9,000, but the move is "really about getting the space and flexibility to do whatever we want, whenever we want, which just wasn't possible in the current situation." Officer has been making his wines at Punchdown Cellars (formerly known as Copain Custom Crush) in Santa Rosa since 1998, when his production was 650 cases, and these 2011 wines are his swan song there.Officer summed up the 2011 vintage, as he saw it, in three words: "focus, delineation and texture.""Disastrous" flowering and non-stop selection in the vineyard meant that production was off by about 25% here but on the bright side "those grapes that made it through were able to ripen slowly and steadily" as there were no dangerous heat spikes that could cause sugars to run wild, which can easily happen in many of the warmer sites where Officer works.