8 November 2006 - 22:08Preston Vineyards, Madam Preston, Grape Wine, 2005 (A)

This certified organic wine is amazingly complex. It posesses a beautiful golden straw color, smells like a honey-wheat bagel and tastes like a sweet green salad with ripe pear, mandarin oranges and tobacco fried onion strings. Look at the label: Madam Preston, Grape Wine. That’s it. The vintage is on the cork and the legally required fine print is very lightly printed directly on the back of the bottle. No foil over the cork means this is a wine for the fridge, not the cellar (I’ve got six bottles down there anyway). I love their confidence in this wine.
From Preston:

Madam Emily Preston was an herbalist and spiritual healer who plied her trade and preserved her clients in the years straddling 1900. The place was the small community of Preston outside Cloverdale in northern Sonoma County. Spiritual needs of its habitués were satisfied by Preston’s Church of Heaven on Probation as well as by potions concocted from local herbs, spiced they say with alcohol and other pleasing things.

At Preston of Dry Creek, not far from Cloverdale, we also cater to the spiritual needs of our followers. With Madam Preston we present an amalgam of white Rhône varietals—Rousanne, Viognier, and Marsanne—that is rich, ripe, and golden as the hills of northern Sonoma County. It is a potion worthy of the Preston tradition.

Our Madam Preston is a twist on the great white blends of Hermitage. We flip the proportions of Rousanne and Marsanne, and then add Viognier to heighten aromatics and complexity.