2012 Zinfandel (Dry Creek Valley)

Mike Officer concluded his 15-year residency at Santa Rosa's Punchdown Cellars (formerly and sometimes still known as Copain Custom Crush to old-timers like him) following the massively productive 2012 vintage and has moved Carlisle into the former Mueller Winery in Windsor. From a start in 1998 with production of 650 cases, Officer is now flirting with the 10,000-case mark, and everything is sold out, with a waiting list that continues to grow. I tasted the 2012s with Officer at the new winery; compared to the hustle and controlled chaos at Punchdown, his new digs, which lie well off a very quiet, mostly residential road, exude a monastic calm. That suits Officer just fine because "the demands of producing as much as many wines (25 in 2012) as we do now makes distractions even more distracting." Two thousand twelve "has the potential to make epic wines if yields were controlled,: he told me, "because the fruit, the stems, everything was pristine, like a dream," a situation that repeated itself in 2013, "which is like another dream: two years in a row with high quantity and high quality? C'mon."