Quilceda Creek Cabernet Sauvignon 2017 / 750 ml.

The flagship 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Columbia Valley is all Cabernet Sauvignon brought up in new barrels (mostly Taransaud and Darnajou). Beautiful crème de cassis, graphite, spice box, and lead pencil notes all flow to a full-bodied, soft, elegant wine that has beautiful tannins, no hard edges, and a seamless texture. It shows the more upfront, charming style of the vintage and is already hard to resist. Nevertheless, it should easily evolve for 20+ years. (Jeb Dunnuck)

Really juicy and savory at the moment with beautiful freshness and linear tightness that frames the wine. It’s full and flavorful with currants, coffee and walnuts. Mahogany, too. The tannins are polished and spread across the palate. Accessible and hard not to drink now, but will age wonderfully, too. Drink or hold.

Revisiting the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon at a year on, the wine remains bold and structured and has had a bit more time to come together and harmonize. The wine remains generous on the nose with sweetness of fruit and a glossy character, which offers chocolaty undertones in the glass with aromas of lavender and black cherry that are still persistent on the nose. Full-bodied, the tannins are beginning to round with an additional year in bottle. At the same time, the palate offers layers of dusty blackberry essence and juicy plums with elegant baking spices from the 100% new French oak aging before ending with a rich, juicy and intense finish. The original score and drink date still stand.

This is 100% Cabernet Sauvignon, with fruit coming from Horse Heaven Hills sites Champoux, Lake Wallula, Palengat, and Wallula. It’s aromatically brooding out of the gate, with notes of cherry meats, barrel spice and incense, not yet ready to reveal its charms. Dense, focused, layered, almost creamy-feeling fruit flavors follow. It is coiled up tightly right now but has all of the stuffing to go the distance and then some. Best from 2030–2037.

Bright medium ruby to the rim. Very ripe aromas of blackberry, cassis, licorice pastille, bitter chocolate, cocoa powder and minerals, lifted by a note of lavender; just this side of liqueur-like. Dense, sweet, silky and firm, with wonderfully suave, dense flavors of dark berries, bitter chocolate and violet dominating. This savory wine finishes with a slowly building whiplash of flavor and the sophisticated seamless tannins to support a long evolution and graceful evolution in bottle. I still give the edge to the 2016 for its energy and lift, but this very deep, youthfully medicinal wine is potentially great as well. Real nobility of texture here (it saturates every square millimeter of the palate) and outstanding palate-staining length. Lots to come!

Quilceda Creek’s flagship cabernet, this is a blend of four vineyards, including estate fruit from Palengat and Champoux, in the Horse Heaven Hills. It’s seamless, balanced and exceedingly well tailored, the scents of tar, tanbark and briar set against bright red fruit in a firm, sinewy package. A wine for lamb.