2010 Outsider

When I ventured the guess to Matt Trevisan that a good third of his wines get drunk by his customers in the first two years after release, he laughed and said "more like half of it most likely." That's a reality that he says he can deal with but he told me that he is slowly amassing a library of wines "to show down the road that they really deserve to be aged and also to recall the experiences of each vintage." Trevisan has recently purchased and begun planting a steep, rocky hillside site near his home property, which will drastically increase his ability to make wine from his own fruit within the next five years. I also tasted through Trevisan's 2011 wines: they look extremely promising, with as much vivacity as I can recall in any set of young wines here. "People can bag on 2011 by trying to compare it to, say, 2009, but you can also look on it as a new chapter" for Paso wines, he said. "They're going to be plenty rich, by any measure, but they've got an elegance that's probably going to shock some people."

This set of wines from proprietor Matt Trevisan was among the most impressive I tasted in Paso Robles. The wines seem to have a bit more energy and focus than in the past. Native fermentations and a generally artisan, hand-made approach informs a style full of personality and character. Some of the wines are aged partly in American oak, which works beautifully for this fruit. Trevisan describes 2010 as a fairly regular October harvest. He adds that 2011 was a much later year, as 60% of the fruit came in during November.