After 23 years of crafting wines from the estate’s Diamondback Vineyard on Black Sage Bench and Tinhorn Creek Vineyard on the Golden Mile Bench, Tinhorn finally has its flagship red wine: The Creek. And it was well worth waiting for. It’s a blend of 53% Cabernet Sauvignon, 19% Merlot, 17% Cabernet Franc, 9% Malbec and 2% Petit Verdot that was pressed and racked to 40% new French and Hungarian oak barrels for malolactic fermentation and ageing. The wines were racked to tank for blending in spring 2016, and then returned to barrel for a further eight months, for a total of 24 months of barrel ageing. It’s about sheer elegance on the nose, a sum of its parts, showing blackberries, cherries, black licorice, graphite, cassis and toasted oak spice and vanilla. It shows its teeth on the palate with a firm foundation of ripe tannins and generous fruit, spice, campfire smoke and earth. It is but a baby at this point and needs time to all calm down to fully appreciate the beauty. Wait for it, it is the new flagship wine, after all.
September 2017