Inwood Estates Tempranillo Cabernet

This is America's Premier Tempranillo-Based Wine.

It is a full-bodied, fully-extracted, inky blend is comprised of 65%
Tempranillo and 35% Cabernet Sauvignon. Both grapes are grown at the
same location in the Texas High Plains just a few miles from the
Texas-New Mexico border. The vineyard site, at Newsom Vineyards in
Yoakum County, Texas, was chosen for its combination of high mineral
soils and cold desert nights where the Tempranillo, in particular, found its
perfect home for the development of tannin and brix.

The French term "terroir", meaning the land or soil, but more widely
known in the wine industry as the flavors conveyed from the soil and site
elements to the wine, is critical in understanding our wines. Tempranillo
is a grape with the Red Fruit flavor profile, much like Pinot Noir, where
Cherries, Raspberries and Strawberries should be most evident. This is
opposite of Black Fruit varieties like Cabernet, Merlot and Syrah where
the dominant flavors should be Black Currant, Blackberries and Cassis.

Red fruit wines MUST have high mineral soils for their flavors to
materialize. For this reason, Tempranillo has never been a significant
grape for California. Yet this, and its native adaptability to hotter climates
make it the perfect wine variety for Texas with one caveat: Tempranillo
must have a nightime temperature of lower than 65 degrees every night
during its ripening season (past veraision) to develop tannin and brix.
This is a process called "respiration" and this requirement excludes
most of Texas from its production.

The Inwood Estates 2005 Tempranillo-Cabernet continues the Inwood
tradition of its superb Flagship wine. Conceived from the beginning as
authentically Spanish style capturing the river valley tradition of blended
Tempranillo wines from Rioja or Duero valleys, this wine projects the
raspberry red-fruit of great Tempranillo combined with the earthy big
black fruit of Cabernet. In particular, 2005 was the latest harvest ever
running into very late September and resulting in thickly layered flavors in
a dark, intense body.

Full Cellaring: What does it mean?

Inwood Estates is committed to fully-cellaring all its wines, a tradition that is fast slipping away from even some
of the highest-priced wines in California. Everyone knows that old wine becomes oxidized, and has seen that
familiar brown color and smell from exposure to oxygen. This exposure can be time-fast, like glasses of wine
sitting out too long in open air, or time-slow, like wine in bottles for too many decades.

By contrast, newly-vinted wine is born into the world in a state that is quite the opposite, which is called
"reductive". Reduction is the opposite of oxidation. Wine that is reductive is equally offensive to the senses as
is oxidized wine, but with quite different symptoms: Reductive wine, especially red, smells and tastes of
inorganic compounds like tire-rubber or plastic. As young wine ages, these sensory effects slowly leave and
sometime not long after they do, the wine is ready to be bottled.

Unfortunately today, most wine is bottled before this time. Aging wine in oak barrels ameliorates reductive
flavors, but is also the most expensive part of making great wines. Oak aging is a complex process too lengthy
to discuss here except to say that wine aging in barrels is aging at an accelerated rate compared to wine aging
in bottles. It is hard to establish a linear relationship between the two rates, but if, for example, a wine in barrels
is aging at 4 times the rate it will later age in bottles, it is easy to see why it is so important that this takes
place in a controlled environment like the winery.

Fully-cellared wines will always benefit from bottle age, but will at least display their true characteristics shortly
after their release. Experienced tasters will be able to predict with fairly good accuracy what the potential of the
wine is as well as make accurate pronouncements about the vintage at this point. Full-cellaring does not
compromise the life of the wine in the bottle. On the contrary, bottling wine in a reductive state denies the wine
important chemical reactions, like necessary enzyme activity, and prevents the wine from ever becoming what it
could have been.

Fully-cellared wines are becoming increasingly scarce today as large parts of the industry embark on
campaigns aimed at convincing consumers that reductive wines actually taste good. This trend could well have
the opposite effect where flooding the market with reductive wines may drive the prices of fully-cellared wines
ever higher as they become more scarce. Inwood Estates uses only French Oak to age its wines.