Holly’s Hill Vineyards, El Dorado (Sierra Foothills, California) Carignane – Mourvedre 2018

 Widely planted throughout the Languedoc and quite prominent in the wines of Corbieres, Carignane is a prolific grape whose wines tend to be, in my experience, rustic and incomplete.  It seems many West Coast wineries have backed away from Carignane, so I was interested to see how growing it on steep hillsides where yields are low and filling it out with 33% Mourvedre would work.  It was aged 10 months in neutral small French oak.  With aeration, it shows dried plum and fig along with red fruit aromas.  Fairly concentrated, it has straightforward ripe black cherry fruit flavors with medium tannins.  Vibrant but a bit rough around the edges, it would benefit from a few years of cellaring.  Overall, quite impressive and shows that the whole is indeed greater than the sum of its parts.