The 2009 L’Orage, tasted from a barrel sample, is a flashy, exotic offering that appears to be slightly more pleasure-bent than its 2008 sibling. The intense Scott Greer is one of Washington’s rising stars. His wines are all sourced from estate vineyards which are just now starting to come into maturity. He keeps yields low and the farming and winemaking are impeccable. Greer notes that he harvests totally on taste. He has recently opened a tasting and sales room in the Seattle area which should improve access to his wines.There is really no mystery as to what Scott Greer is doing at Sheridan; total attention to detail, a great vineyard, impeccable farming, and non-interventionist winemaking.www.sheridanvineyard.com

Representing, as noted on its label, the tenth anniversary of this flagship blend of the two Cabernets (two-thirds -Sauvignon), Greer’s 2009 L’Orage spent just over two years in 75% new barriques and emerged with a strong influence of toasty, caramelized wood resin as well as with volatile evocations of distilled sloe and cassis, banana oil, and varnish, traits that bear careful watching as it evolves in bottle. The sweet concentration of jammy and reconstituted dried berries is reinforced by caramel and chocolate on a thick, slick palate, and the wine finishes with both an oily cling and gum-numbing tannins, any sense of primary juiciness having either been dried out on the vine or by tannins from three-quarters new and one-quarter second fill barrels. As noted, this is one to monitor carefully if cellaring, for more than one reason. Scott Greer confesses to having made “every mistake you can” in the initial course of planting his small vineyard on an overgrown former apple orchard in the Rattlesnake Hills. But based on what I could observe of his site and wines as well as those of Chris Camarda’s next-door Two Blondes, it seems as though nature may also have thrown up a bit of a roadblock in the form of hard-pan caliche not far from the surface in much of this sector, a feature that could quite conceivably be implicated in the extremely chewy, often drying tannins of so many Greer wines, characteristics that I would think encourage a lighter hand with fermentative extraction than he seems to have been willing to exercise. Apropos fermentations, they are generally yeasted and by Greer’s own admission “hot,” and he favors punch-down and rack-and-return over irrigation of the cap, but pre-fermentative cold soak can last as long as six days. Greer manages as well as sources fruit from nearby Dineen and Meek vineyards (making wines for the latter – reviewed separately in this report – in a common facility). Extremely eager and articulate, he reveals the personality that drove this financial planner as he turned into a wine grower, but also reveals that – after a dozen vintages, ever-more intensive planning, and heaps of critical praise (to which I’m afraid I won’t very significantly add) – he has become a veteran (though happily one not as hardened as are some of his wines). Greer says he harvests when “seeds are cocoa brown, stems are dark brown, (and) with a slight sagging of the grape skin itself (which) tells me that the vine is starting to shut down and has given me all it has,” but he acknowledges that in 2009 there was puckering, not merely sagging, of skins and more than the usual instances of shut down in the course of an especially hot high summer, features all traceable in the resultant wines. “We picked all of our Cabernet in two days from October 9-10,” relates Greer, whereas “usually we take two weeks and begin around the 18th at the earliest.” The 2010s here represent a predictably strong contrast. Greer calls them “Washington-” and his 2009s “California-style.” Wines labeled by Greer for a specific varietal, incidentally, are virtually always 100% from that grape because he thinks – whether or not one credits his reasoning – that it’s misleading to, for instance “say ‘Cabernet Sauvignon,’ but then put a bunch of other varietals in there to change that (varietal) aspect of the wine. I want a pure expression of Cabernet Sauvignon, or Syrah.” (Inaugural releases from Greer and his Sheridan Vineyard under the label “Crossfork Creek” are reviewed separately in this report under that name.) Tel. (425) 401-0167