Bond Quella 2017
Bond Quella 2017 is a wine for Cabernet Sauvignon lovers. Revealing beautiful perfumes of blackberries, blueberries and forest floor in the nose, this wine presents a full-body along with velvety and polished tannins on the palate. This is a refined and very focused Napa Valley Cabernet, with a firm structure, beautiful texture and impressive length that reveals a savory salinity and touches of citrus. A wine to age for at least 5 years before uncorking.
Bond Vecina is the name for the wine from a 9-acre site located in the eastern hills overlooking the heart of the Napa Valley. Making its debut with the 2006 vintage, the name is derived from the German word for a pristine source or an artesian aquifer. This property is steeply sloped facing southwest. The site is an ancient riverbed composed of cobble and rocks interwoven with pockets of tufa (volcanic ash) that were uplifted during the last volcanic activity in the area. Quella displays an almost ethereal quality of blue fruits, graphite, and a vibrant, subtle finish.
Founded by the visionary Californian vintner Bill Harlan, BOND Estates produced its very first vintage in 1997. Three years later, a winery was constructed and dedicated to this line of unique Napa Valley wines. The BOND portfolio has come to include five distinctive wines: five single-vineyard, single-variety Cabernet Sauvignon cuvees, offering genuine expressions of their celebrated terroirs of origin. The Quella by BOND is a red wine made 100% with Cabernet Sauvignon grapes, which are harvested from the 9-acre Quella vineyard. Planted in 1991, the southwest-facing vines of Quella enjoy an ideallic location on a riverbed, stretching their roots deep into a soil composed of cobble, rocks and tufa (pockets of volcanic ash). This plot is situated on a hillside, between 433 and 595 feet above sea level. The Quella vineyard produces the lowest yield of the BOND properties, resulting in wines with fantastic structure and a signature salinity.
From an 11-acre vineyard sitting near Bond’s winery and the Harlan estate, the 2012 Vecina Proprietary Red is the perfect Napa version of a hypothetical blend of a La Mission Haut-Brion and Mouton-Rothschild. This is riveting Cabernet Sauvignon with great intensity, a killer fragrance of burning embers, charcoal, gravel, blackberry, cassis and earth. Fabulously intense and full-bodied, with majestic flavor intensity, a skyscraper-like mouthfeel, incredible purity and length, and supple tannins, this magnificent wine comes closest to the great Harlan Estate itself.
Drink it over the next 35 years. These exceptionally impressive wines from Bill Harlan are all majestic in 2012. There are between 500 and 600 cases of each of these essentially single vineyard wines from five separate micro-climates in Napa Valley, with the exception of the Matriarch, which comes from the barrels and lots culled from the different single vineyards that were considered slightly more forward and less profound than the individual wines. All of them have great singularity and are made with absolutely no compromises. In the great vintages, such as 2012 and no doubt 2013, these wines clearly have 25-35+ years of aging potential. I wouldn’t be surprised in certain years to see them go on for 50 or more years
