We have today one barrel of a single vineyard, single variety, 2024 Mt. Veeder Cabernet to release. 24 cases.

As was the case with the last two MTV wines, it was a condition of the purchase of the fruit that we not market its specific origin. But I think that hinting at it is fair game. The fruit is from one of the oldest estates on Mt. Veeder, originally planted to Riesling, by fanatical German immigrants who embraced everything that was impossible and foreboding about Mt. Veeder.

The vines are east-facing, and their soil is not loamy. I thought that the 2023 wine was pretty good wine, but in some senses, it was a challenge: also from east-facing vines, but on rich, loamy soil, eager to produce wines of great richness and, you might say, a certain tendency toward chocolate frosting.

This wine is nothing like that at all. It is a wine of precision and restraint: in some ways like a stern Riesling reflected through a tannin-imparting mirror. When I tasted the wine from barrel about a month ago, it made me cry.

I had the courage and enthusiasm to give the wine a classical name: "Pergamos," named for the citadel of Priam, the Castle sitting atop the rocky promontory of Troy. It is worth knowing, in reference to the Greeks, that there is not clearly any word for "citadel" in Homer, and certainly no word for "castle." I had to look it up to be sure. When you visit the palace of many rooms of a Homeric lord, you visit their ?????? their home.

All of this counts as clues to the wine's origin.