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Storybook Mountain
Estate Wines
Napa Estate, Mayacamas Range
Wines of forward fruit, supple balance and sensual promise. If
the exuberance of youth is a key to your enjoyment of Zinfandel,
this is your wine.
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Napa Estate Reserve
Selected from the best barrels of the vintage, these wines take complexity and depth to another dimension. Layers of flavors and aromas, enhanced by depth, focus and length, destine our Reserves to age gracefully over many years.
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Napa Estate, Eastern Exposures
A special cuvée from the heart of our east-facing estate vineyards. Elegant and fragrant, it delights the nose and palate with plushly textured, deep, oak enriched berry-like fruit and impeccable balance.
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Napa Estate, Antaeus
A blend of Zinfandel with Bordeaux varieties, drawing from our land the best qualities of each area of our estate, to yield an intense wine of great complexity.
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Zin Gris
- Barrel Fermented Blood of Zinfandel
Patterned after the dry rosé wines of Provence, this wine is aromatic and deeply flavored. Fully mature grapes are slowly barrel fermented to dryness in our cool century-old caves.
Click
here for a list of available wines
Seps Estate Wines
Cabernet and Viognier
from our certified organic vineyards
Cabernet Sauvignon
The same structure, finesse, and purity of fruit that have long characterized Storybook Mountain Zinfandels are evident in Seps Estate Cabernet Sauvignon. These qualities reflect the estate vineyard's relatively cool climate, its clay-loam soils, and its easterly and northerly exposures. The style of the wines also reflects Jerry Seps' preference for wines of moderate alcohol, intense, focused fruit and exemplary balance.
Seps Estate cabernet sauvignon rosé
"Don’t be under the impression that the only good rosé comes from France; some of the best are made right here in California. SEPS, an offshoot of Storybook Mountain, makes a tiny amount of this wine (it is available through the Storybook Mountain Web site), and it is killer. With tea rose, raspberries, cherries and blood oranges, this full-bodied wine is up there with the best rosés France has to offer."
Pamela S. Busch is the wine director and proprietor of
CAV Wine Bar & Kitchen in San Francisco.
Viognier
Barrel fermented to dryness and aged on its lees, this sensual
white wine is unusually aromatic and flavorful, with an exceptionally
full middle palate.
"Lovely aromas of white peaches, Bosc pears and honeysuckle are joined by hints of hardwoods in the rich and pulpy first impression. The wine is full bodied in weight and exceptionally well-balanced in spite of its evident viscosity. Its flavors are long and rich, pulpy and minerally, nicely on-point and promise to get better over time. Despite early charms, this one can be laid away for several years."
** - 91 Points - Connoisseurs' Guide to California Wine
Click here for a list of available wines
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The old Question
of Aging |
Zinfandel
is famous for the delicious richness of its fruit, and this
aspect is never stronger than when a wine is young. And, if
the occasion calls for the brightness of youth, this is when
the wine should be drunk. But there is more, much more.
 art
of the question of aging Zinfandel has to do with the perception
of the taster. Lacking famous antecedents in Europe, expectations
for Zinfandel are often different and less. How can this New
World baby possibly approach the sophistication of the best
of Europe? Flavors and nuances of mature wine for some people
are thus only associated with the classics of the Old World,
be they Burgundies or Barolos. At our house, however, if let
us say a Cabernet is aging well, we compliment it as tasting
like a mature Zinfandel.
Those
factors which allow some wines to add the sensual qualities
of maturity to the best attributes of youth are primarily three:
balance, first and foremost, of fruit, tannins and acids; intensity,
rather than either weight or high alcohol; and structure, the
backbone or core around which a wine may develop. All aspects
of a wine are modified by bottle age. The color change is brought
on by the polymerization of phenols, principally anthocyanins.
Polymerization of other tannins and acids also occur, most notably
seen as tartrate deposits. The varietally based aromas of wine
are augmented by the bouquet of aging, in part because of the
increase in esters from the interaction of acids and alcohol,
and in part because of the enhancement of aroma as the wine
achieves oxidative stabilization.
What
is the result? For the best wines - retention, complexity and
integration. The varietal character and basic fruit core of
the wine is retained, the berry and spice that make Zinfandel
Zinfandel. Around this core develop additional flavors and bouquet
- sandalwood, nutmeg, cardamom with small admixtures of minerals
and vanilla. No aspect of the wine dominates, but all components
are seamlessly integrated, with the core of the wine providing
the focus for this increased complexity. Perfume, silk and seduction!
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