2005 Jericho Canyon Vineyard

Two thousand five will be the last vintage for David Ramey's Jericho Canyon cabernet sauvignon, as the owners have decided to build a winery of their own and keep all of their fruit. (Ramey had worked with this vineyard since the 1998 vintage, when he was the winemaker for Rudd Estate.) This bottling will be replaced by an as-yet-unnamed proprietary cabernet starting with the 2006 vintage. Ramey does a twice-daily pumpover of his red wines for "maximum color and flavor extraction," and does a total cuvaison of about 21 days, but handles his white wines more gently-he calls it "Champagne-style"-for greater finesse. He also believes that gentle handling allows his chardonnays to develop greater complexity and not simply be fruit bombs. To emphasize his point about the value of holding his chardonnays, Ramey opened a head-spinning 2002 Hyde that offered luscious, smoky citrus and melon flavors and still-youthful tang and grip.

David Ramey emphasized that he makes his wines "completely hands-off, with no tricks. We couldn't mess with them even if we wanted to," he told me. "Hell, we don't even own a filter." But he does co-own a fancy new bottling line, which he recently bought with Chateau Montelena and which was hooked up and in action when I visited in March. While many of Ramey's wines see ample oak, he doesn't view barrels as flavoring agents, saying that "elevage shouldn't simply be an oak-aging period" and that he wants any oak influence to work in concert with the fruit. He describes 2005 as "more elegant than 2004, which is notable for its ripeness, but with plenty of maturity itself."