2022 Caymus Vineyards Zinfandel

The 2022 Caymus Vineyards Zinfandel presents a classic study in the Wagner family’s signature dial-up approach to extraction, yet it holds a distinctly nostalgic place within their portfolio. Visually pouring a saturated dark ruby with slight opacity, the nose avoids sheer confectionary single-notedness, opening instead with dense boysenberry compote, black cherry, and shaved nutmeg, underlaid by a subtle cedar-box woodiness and an unusual flash of wintergreen. On the palate, the entry feels characteristically plush and broad, but the weight quickly reveals a firmer, rustic structural core driven by fine, tea-like tannins and unexpected savory notes of thyme, mushroom, and tree bark that balance the lavish, dark fruit profile.

An obscure, historical technical detail of this bottling involves the head-trained, bush-vine architecture retained in several of its micro-sourced vineyard blocks. Unlike modern high-wire trellis systems that allow uniform sunlight, these free-standing, crown-pruned "goblet" vines create a natural canopy shade that causes individual berries on a single cluster to ripen at wildly variable rates. The resulting harvest inherently incorporates a small fraction of under-ripe, acid-bright pink berries alongside over-ripe raisins on the very same cluster, giving the 2022 vintage its peculiar interplay between sweet, concentrated fruit density and underlying savory, forest-floor acidity.

90 points, James Suckling.