Can you remember the last time you mistook a $40-ish bottle of Sonoma Cabernet Sauvignon for a $100-plus wine from the Napa Valley? I can’t, because it had never happened...until I tasted Fallon Place. I’m not exaggerating when I say this is one of the best price-to-quality Cabernets I’ve ever had from California.
Its maker, Cory Michal, is a veritable renaissance man, and the small-lot single-vineyard wines he’s crafting in the Dogpatch neighborhood of San Francisco (you read that right!) should have Napa’s elite shaking in their boots. Each is meticulously sourced from a tiny vineyard in Sonoma and vinified with the utmost respect for the natural process of wine; no additions, no manipulations, no ego. This particular bottle comes from a vineyard the size of a postage stamp—one single acre nestled on the Sonoma side of the Mayacamas mountain range. Elevation, well-draining soils, and sustainable farming chisels these grapes into concentrated capsules of pure mountain terroir. Today’s 2016 presents that mountain-grown intensity in the most appealingly transparent way, and at an incredible price given its quality. The value proposition here cannot be overstated!
Cory, like most New World winemakers, wasn’t born into the craft. He grew up in a small town in Wisconsin where wine played a distant second fiddle to beer. But Cory traveled and lived in Europe during a portion of his late twenties, and had the good fortune of living next door to a well-curated wine shop. He was introduced to the world’s classic wines, and then the not-so-classics, and something clicked. “It just changed me forever,” he says. With a deep appreciation for the world’s greatest wines, Cory returned to the states and promptly moved to San Francisco to pursue his Viticulture and Enology degree at UC Davis. Meanwhile, he ceaselessly roamed the vineyards of Sonoma County while working harvests at a few of San Francisco’s urban wineries. All of which is to say: He did his homework and he did it well. Making wine was a calling, and one Cory didn’t take lightly. It’s no surprise that this 2016 has so much in common with the greatest Californian Cabernets: Mayacamas, Spring Mountain, Corison. He studied those wines intending to create something similarly transcendent, grounded in place and time...just a lot less expensive so the pleasure is undiluted.
Cory’s first vintages were produced in the old, empty cellar of the building next to his apartment in the Russian Hill neighborhood of San Francisco. Fallon Place was built in 1917 and featured a series of ludicrously steep stone staircases. After noticing the brick landing at the base of the stairs looked exactly like a tiny crushpad, Cory hedged his bets and asked the owner if he could use the cellar space for wine storage. Sure enough, the next few vintages meant a barrel of grapes (crushed and destemmed before being transported from Sonoma to the city) sitting on those same steps.
Good news for us: the wines were delicious and Fallon Place quickly outgrew its namesake before the landlady figured out what was going on. Cory linked up with the folks at Dogpatch Winery in San Francisco and started producing his first commercially viable wines there in 2012. He upheld the same standards in that tiny cellar that he does in the new winery: vinify small-lot, single-vineyard wines with a perfect balance between vine, rootstock, and terroir. The Nacimento Vineyard perfectly embodies those standards, perched at 300 feet in the foothills of the Mayacamas range, but on the Sonoma side. It’s barely one acre and benefits from well-draining Kidd-series gravelly loam—ideal for Cabernet. The resulting clusters are loose, with thick-skinned small berries and incredible flavor concentration. And Cory is just as strict about his winemaking as his vineyard selection. His intervention has always been minimal, using native yeast fermentations and gravity-fed systems wherever possible to minimize his impact on the fruit. His Nacimento Vineyard Cabernet was barreled in new and neutral oak for 18 months before being bottled.
The wine pours dense and nearly opaque, with a dark purple core and a delicate magenta rim. The aromatics are initially subdued. I waited a full half-hour to 45 minutes before some of the lighter floral notes were substantiated with a richer core of fresh crushed boysenberry and licorice. It’s well-worth your patience to swirl in Bordeaux stems and revisit every five minutes until you start to smell wildflowers and wet stone. There’s something so fresh and alive about this wine even before you lift the glass to your lips. The palate is all about fresh fruits like black cherries and açaí uplifted by quintessential Bordeaux-style violets. The texture of this Cabernet is almost indistinguishable from its minerality. The two are perfectly intertwined, and that crushed-rock flavor sits right in the middle of your palate where the fine tannins are.
If you’re looking for sweet, super-extracted Cabernet Sauvignon I’ll tell you right now: this is not it. This is a long-distance runner, lean and muscular (I’ll be excited to check back in 5-7 years). But it’s also soft, bold, and never tiring for the palate right down to the last sip. I’m tempted to keep things really classic with a wine like this. A ribeye and some roasted parsnips, both liberally sprinkled with sea salt and good butter—that’ll do nicely. Cheers!
