2012 Three Wine Company Zinfandel Evangelho Contra Costa County

Matt Cline’s 2012 Zinfandel Evangelho Vineyard — “I took down the sorting table!”

It was one of the more uncomfortable conversations/negotiations of the last seven years. Since 2009, we’ve championed Matt Cline’s 100-year-old vine Zinfandels, lauding them as the most extravagant in California. WineAccess members have loaded their cellars with Three Zins. In short-crop harvests like 2011, nearly half of Matt’s production was offered to WineAccess.

We’d been anxiously awaiting the release of the 2012 Zinfandels for nearly six months, after first tasting them out of barrel in the late spring of 2013. As was the case up and down the Silverado Trail and Sonoma Coast, 2012 was a phenomenal vintage on the Delhi sand dunes of Contra Costa. Zinfandel loves the sunshine, even if these gnarly head-trained vines can be blistered by sudden heat spikes. Barely a drop of rain fell on Oakley between June and late August, yet temperatures remained mild.

Cline, who has been crafting ancient-vine Zinfandels off of historic Evangelho Vineyard since the early 1980s, told us he’d never seen a vintage like 2012. “Usually, with Zinfandel, there’s a lot of sorting to be done at harvest because, on the same cluster, berries are often of different sizes and maturity. In 2012, the berries at Evangelho were absolutely uniform, more like Cabernet Sauvignon than Zin. On day two, I took down the sorting table. There was nothing to sort!”

Following that tasting of 2013, we confirmed our annual allocation. Of the 600-case production, 200 cases were earmarked for our membership. The first half of our allocation was ordered and shipped as expected. But as to a second salvo, we were shortchanged on what has consistently been the highest-rated under-$20 Zinfandel in WineAccess history! (see the histogram above!)

Reminiscent of Paul Draper’s Ridge Geyserville Zins of the late 1980s and 1990s, the 2012 Evangelho is glistening dark-purple in hue, infused with intoxicating aromas of violets, blackberry, and spice. Wildly concentrated, juicy yet beautifully chiseled on the attack, packed with blackberry and black raspberry preserves. Despite the phenomenal opulence of the vintage, this 2012 powerhouse remains perfectly poised and light on its feet, finishing with age-worthy backbone and persistence. Drink now for its primary-fruit hedonism or lay down until the early 2020s.

If you’re a regular reader, by now you probably know the rest of this story. Matt made two sales trips to the Big Apple. There was no need to make a third. The winemaker claims to have done “all he could” to temper the appetites of Manhattan’s sommeliers-to-the-stars … to no avail.

How do we feel about being shorted? Not good. But more on that later.

The last 480 bottles are up for grabs. $34 on release. $20 this morning. Shipping included on 6.

• ABV 15.40%
• Enjoy right away
• % Zinfandel