Dear Davies and Schramsberg Club Members,
With 60 years of our family business now in the books, we are looking to revel in 2025! Several commemorative tastings, dinners and parties are being planned in different locations around the country. Thank you for checking your email inbox and our social media pages for updates as we go through the year. First up is our Diamonds and Denim Celebration up in Jack and Jamie’s Grove on Saturday, May 16. We are targeting a Chicago dinner event on Thursday, May 21, and are set for a J. Schram vertical tasting and dinner at the Terranea Resort in the Los Angeles area’s Palos Verdes Peninsula on Thursday, June 12. A tentative Thursday, August 7 tasting and dinner date is set for One Market on the Embarcadero in San Francisco and our biggest party of the year is being planned for Saturday, September 27 back in the Grove at Schramsberg. Scheduling is underway for Dallas, New York and Miami in the fall as well. We’re pulling out the stops in our diamond anniversary year!
To add a little depth to the Isidro Ceja story, I wanted to personally thank him for mentoring and supporting me along my path from student to cellar hand to winemaker to business manager. In the vineyards with Jaime Aguirre and Ernesto Herrera, or in the winery with Felipe Martinez, Ramon Viera, Efren Torres and Miguel Moreno, I have always been warmly welcomed into our workplace and community. Lessons in patience, commitment, faith and integrity were quietly woven into my training by this extraordinary crew, as would have been the case for other members of our winemaking and management team. The foundation at Schramsberg and Davies Vineyards has been built by these 40-year veterans, to whom we share the highest gratitude.
On to this April’s wine shipments, I start with the Davies red wines. With the passing of time, the depth in our Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir library grows and the Jack & Jamie’s Circle members are the beneficiaries. The relatively dry, gentle 2007 Napa Cabernet vintage was as highly acclaimed as any in the decade of the 2000’s and we are thrilled to be able to include a now 17-year-old bottle from our J. Davies Diamond Mountain Estate this shipment. Another extraordinary offering in the J&J package is the 2013 Hyde Vineyards Carneros Pinot Noir. Father Larry, son Chris, and the Hyde family have partnered with us in our sparkling program for 30 years now. We’re excited to revisit our first Hyde red Pinot Noir with you now, 11 years post-harvest.
For the broader Davies Club membership, we have assembled a three-pack selection of current-vintage Cabernet Sauvignon and Pinot Noir. 2021 delivered an arid, low-yielding season; it was our tenth vintage at the Davies Winery in St. Helena, and our tenth working with St. Helena Cabernet. Crafted principally from Dr. Gold’s vineyard across Main Street, this generous and broad red wine gains depth from the Leonardini and McGrath vineyards underneath the town’s western hills and the Criscione vineyard just above town on the east side of the valley.
Our relationship with the Dutton Family in Sonoma’s Russian River Valley now dates back over 20 years. While we have principally worked with the family’s Chardonnay vineyards across west Sonoma County in our sparkling program, we started working with their Pinot Noir in our red program in 2018. Their Hallberg Vineyard, resting on a slope just to the east of Green Valley delivers a delicious medley of berries and spice in this 2022 bottling. Also from 2022, a third consecutive dry and early season on the North Coast, is the Napa Valley Carneros bottling. A blend of the more supple fruit grown at the Hyde and Brown Ranch sites north of Highway 12 with the more linear expression of the Three Amigos fruit at the Carneros’ most southern end, this wine exhibits vibrant depth.
For our sparkling enthusiasts in the Riddler’s Circle, we are pleased to present two Pinot Noir–based selections from our library in this shipment. The 2013 Extra Brut showcases four of the top Pinot vineyards all still in our program today, including Juster-Anderson Valley, Nobles-Ft. Ross-Seaview, Jonive-Occidental, and Stevens-Tomales Bay. This bone-dry disgorgement truly embraces the palate at 11 years of age. Our second RC offering here, the 2016 Blanc de Noirs, has just moved out of its adolescent phase, gaining caramelized and seasoned depth. It will be cool to compare with the just-released 2022 Blanc de Noirs, included in all sparkling shipments this spring. Enjoy the six-year spread of time with these bottles that enthusiasts like us enjoy aging for decades.
The second sparkling bottle going out to all sparkling club members is the 2016 J. Schram Rosé. Built on a tart, strident frame of the vintage’s best Chardonnays (Dutton-Green Valley, Wilkinson-Carneros, and Stevens-Tomales Bay), and layered with it’s most flavorful Pinots (Piedra Libre-Freestone and Nobles-Ft. Ross), this one represents our very best Rose effort of the year. At just over one percent of our total production, we gave the blend the first pick of all the lots that we produced and then aged it for 7.5 years on the yeast in the bottle in our caves prior to disgorgement. It is absolutely worth celebrating!
On behalf of our family and team, we extend our very best to all of our club members! Thank you for giving us the opportunity to pursue our passion every year.
Hugh, Monique, the Davies Family, and the greater Schramsberg Community