Bitter-edged black currant and seedy blackberry invigoratingly if granularly inform the Mark Ryan 2007 Dead Horse, with accents of smoky black tea, crushed stone, and pencil lead adding intrigue to an admirably gripping finish. What would significantly benefit this palpably dense Cabernet are primary juiciness, brightness, and dynamic interplay such as were achieved in its 2009 counterpart. I would recommend planning on enjoying it over the next 6-8 years. Given the generally high quality of vintage 2007, it’s tempting – and, I suspect, fair – to see the strength of the 2009 Dead Horse when compared with this recent predecessor as proof of a new quality standard being set at Mark Ryan since the arrival of Mike MacMorran.
For just over a dozen years, ex wine salesman and self-taught vintner Mark Ryan McNeilly has been successfully cultivating his garagiste image and receiving accolades for his wines. In the process, he has earned the trust of and been correspondingly aided by a cadre of star Washington vineyards. I only had a chance to taste with him and his New Zealand-born winemaking right-hand man, Mike MacMorran (who joined McNeilly in 2008), around half of the different Mark Ryan bottlings, which last year represented 47 different fermentation lots and a total production in the vicinity of 7,000 cases. Yes, the garage keeps growing – or rather, it seems, keeps threatening to become inadequate to McNeilly’s ambitious task. “It’s becoming harder to make wine the way we want from Woodinville,” he confessed to me, “so we’re considering moving our production facility east so we can be near the vineyards.” (He has already installed a winery tasting room in burgeoning downtown Walla Walla.) Fermentative extraction in reds is primarily via punch-downs, with the wine pressed to barrel at or very near dryness and without settling. Both procedures, MacMorran emphasizes, need to be gentle. He and McNeilly are very particular about their choice of barrels, and in 2012 completed a move – based on rigorous testing and blind tasting – to utilizing 500-liter puncheons rather than 225-liter barriques. McNeilly admits that his Woodinville facility – like most in his state – can’t achieve extremely high humidity, which means, among other things, that levels of alcohol will tend to concentrate significantly in the course of elevage. That the finished reds I tasted from diverse sources and cepages all weighed-in at between 14.7-14.9% alcohol is thus a tribute to studied control, which plainly incorporates judicious bleeding and watering-back of his musts. McNeilly’s early successes were Bordelais blends: the Merlot-dominated Long Haul and Cabernet Sauvignon-centric Dead Horse, both from Red Mountain fruit. But he has recently shown himself a master of multiple Rhone cepages. “I was working with young vines when I started,” says McNeilly of his Mourvedre and Syrah sources, “but now these vines are getting into their sweet spots.” Incidentally, a sparging stone is employed with those varieties to oxygenate the young wines and thereby ward-off reduction.
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