2009 Tempranillo

This will be the last year the Epoch wines will be made at the Denner winery, as Epoch's owner, Liz and Bill Armstrong, will have completed their own facility in the Paderewski vineyard in time to receive the 2014 harvest.Winemaker Jordan Fiorentini takes a bittersweet view of that fact.She told me that while "it will be a huge, huge thrill" for Epoch to have a winery all to themselves, she'll miss the energy of being surrounded at the Denner space and in the Willow Creek area in general by pretty much the who's who of the west side Paso wine scene."It's right up the road, sure, but distances can seem to grow" over time, she said."This has been ground zero for so much that's happened here, and we've been incredibly lucky to be in the middle of it."The climatic realities of the 2011 vintage meant lower-octane wines than normal for Epoch, but that's all relative.These were among the richest, most densely packed wines that I tasted on my trip but they don't lack for a degree of elegance.And that's not simply a function of the vintage, Fiorentini told me."I've been backing steadily off of extraction and oak," she said, "because it's clear that the vineyard is always going to give us all the power we need.So now the job is to let the fruit come through as clearly as possible."

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.