We started this endeavor to explore the realm of possibility – both in Napa Valley and in ourselves. From fledgling start-up to an established domaine, the ethos of Realm Cellars has always been to dare greatly. Yet the journey represents more than a quest for greatness in winegrowing. Through the seasons, Realm has become the collective effort of a team to transform nature into humanity.
Credo Quia Absurdum
June 5th, 2023
A Vertical Tasting of The Absurd
What happens when an artist suspends reality in pursuit of something beyond…something divine within the craft? That’s the proposition behind The Absurd, the wine that arguably put Realm Cellars on the map. As we have said elsewhere, The Absurd stems from a simple yet fantastically complex proposition: it is the best wine Realm Cellars produces. And each time we make this wine, we start with a blank canvas. There are no rules as to vineyard sourcing, varietal blend, or production size. Our sole guide is our palate.
When we sat down on a cool day in early June 2023 for a vertical tasting of every vintage of The Absurd from 2012-2021, it was an opportunity to take stock of the progress over a decade. We were preparing for our 2023 Summer Release, which included the current release of The Absurd from the 2021 vintage, as well as eight prior vintages. As with our Library Release in Spring 2023, we released these older vintages to offset our lack of 2020 wines, and also as a way to offer our members something truly inspiring, a retrospective of this singular wine over the past decade.
Before tasting, Scott reminded us that first and foremost The Absurd is a “winemaker’s wine.” It is a wine less about place and more about personality.
Scott: “Unlike our single vineyard wines, The Absurd is about selecting the best barrels or the best fractions of barrels. It’s about blending over viticulture. It is based purely on the palate impression of the wine. This is Benoit’s wine.”
Because we have no preconceived notions of what The Absurd should be or where it should come from, the production volume varies, sometimes dramatically, as we tease out the finest lots of the vintage. That may be a few hundred bottles; it may be a few thousand. In 2020, it was none at all.
Our tasting began with 2012 The Absurd, a wine created when Realm 2.0 was just getting off the ground. At the time, we were scrappy, a virtual brand that was nearly bankrupt; we had a lot to prove to the world – and to ourselves.
Benoit knew this as much as anyone: “I kept thinking we needed to do something crazy, explorative and out of the norm. I isolated the most glorious barrels of the vintage. We tasted and blended with Michel (Rolland) and came up with a wine we thought represented this new chapter at Realm."
It worked. In late 2014 Robert M. Parker, Jr. of Wine Advocate gave 2012 The Absurd 100 points, calling it a “tour de force” and Realm’s “finest achievement to date.” Of course, we didn’t have that score when we created 2013 The Absurd, but we thought – we knew – we were onto something.
Benoit: “We were always trying to progress no matter the situation or vintage. Always asking ourselves what we could do better, how we could become more precise and make a more layered, complex wine. We still do.”
The Absurd vertical reflected this progression unequivocally. 2012 The Absurd is massive, a decadent wine that was intended to – and did – make a statement. In 2013 and 2014, we see more refinement, partly due to vintage differences but also because we had more fruit sources available to us and were gaining more control and confidence. 2015 stands apart, a warm “solar” vintage that nevertheless produced a juicy, extroverted wine.
Then, with 2016 The Absurd, we see a shift. Moving to our own winery in the Stags Leap District was a game changer, and the increased control over our space, equipment, and winemaking practices from fermentation to bottling is evident. For the first time, we were also able to introduce fruit from Moonracer toThe Absurd, and the addition of Stags Leap District fruit added more depth, texture, and pure pleasure to the wine.
The 2017 was a great wine albeit an anomaly due to the fire that harvest. Still, with most of our fruit picked ahead of the fire, we knew we had excellent barrel lots that would make The Absurd just as good as its predecessors. We made less of it that year, but it stands tall in the lineup, showcasing a surprising amount of freshness.
Finally, the majestic 2018, 2019 and 2021 vintages, each showing similar progressions in refinement and precision as even more fruit sources, including estate fruit, become available and we get comfortable in our own winemaking facility. These wines reflect their vintages, but the signature of The Absurd and of Realm is loud and clear.
Scott: “It may not be as much about place, but the wine is certainly distinct... I would argue The Absurd captures a unique spirit within the world of wine, with its ripeness, richness, elegance, sunshine, structure and chiseled nuances of flavor.”
Benoit: “There are few wines in life that move you, that produce emotion. We want The Absurd to be that wine for people, the one that is just a little magical.”
As a wine that embodies Realm’s goal of progressing with every vintage, The Absurd epitomizes our mantra: the best is yet to come.
Note: If you are a follower of Realm and The Absurd, you know that we don’t usually provide a “Wine Profile” in our release notes. For this library release, however, we provided Wine Profiles to give members a sense of how the wines are evolving and whether, in our personal view, they should be enjoyed sooner or held for further aging.
What’s Past is Prologue
January 20th, 2023
Tasting History: A Decade+ of Library Wines from Realm
This spring, we will do something we haven’t done since the restart of the brand in 2012: release a substantial inventory of library wines. In 2012, it was about survival. The business was on the precipice of bankruptcy, and we needed to sell everything we could in order to continue. In 2023 the situation is thankfully more stable. We are in better shape today than ten years ago, yet the complete loss of our 2020 vintage due to the wildfires in Napa Valley is admittedly a massive strain on the business. But the library release is about much more than just navigating the loss of 2020. It’s a chance to offer our members something unique, a retrospective of our work over the past decade.
We reviewed our cellar inventory and came up with over 70 library wines going back to 2009. Since we hadn’t tasted some of the older wines in a while, we staged a tasting of all the vintages to ensure each wine delivers the high standard of quality to which we hold ourselves. In some vintages we had only 1.5L or 3L formats remaining in our cellar, so we purchased that same wine in 750mL format from the secondary market. (We didn’t want to open 3L bottles for tasting because that would only reduce the available inventory!) We wouldn’t sell a bottle of 2009 Beckstoffer To Kalon in 3L, for example, not having a sense for what it tastes like today. We owe our members more than that.
The date was set: the tasting took place over two days, December 21 and 22, 2022, in the library at Realm Cellars. Ten vintages, seventy-three wines, approximately ten hours of tasting. Four people: Scott, Benoit, Jonathan Cristaldi, the Napa correspondent for Decanter, and Mora Cronin, our long-time copywriter. A logistical feat only to be outdone by the challenge of the spring release itself. To ensure a level playing field, we did not decant any of the wines, just opened the bottles, poured and tasted. We took our time with each wine to reflect, update tasting notes, and try to put context around each one.
Even before a cork was pulled, we anticipated this tasting would reveal not only the profiles of the wines but to an extent, the history of Realm itself. We were not disappointed. Tasting wines going back to 2009 was a trip down memory lane, a reminder of where Scott and Benoit were in 2011 and 2012 when Realm 2.0 began.
Scott: “When you taste through this progression, it’s less about the vintages and more about what was happening at the time. In a relatively short period we went from near-insolvency to owning our own land and winery. It’s fascinating to see how that shows up in the wines.”
The stories and reflections abounded. Scott remembers paying for the bottles, labels and corks for the bottling of the 2010 vintage in June 2012 before he even signed the deal to acquire Realm. All of the Realm vendors at the time required payment up front, and things were tight in the business. He didn’t own the wine yet, but he went all-in on Realm, a leap of faith. Benoit remembers tasting through the early vintages with his mentor Michel Rolland and hearing him say, “Your wines could be better. Get back to work.” Realm declassified many barrels from those early vintages.
There was the 2011 vintage, widely panned by critics, and a low point for Realm when the wines were reviewed, but in our tasting, the wines showed beautifully. It was a reminder that even in supposedly poor vintages, great wines can be produced. They simply may need more time in bottle.
Then 2012, a fine vintage by all accounts, although Realm still declassified 32 out of 230 barrels. It was painful, but the right thing to do. The 2012s Realm bottled were special – they still are – and when the wines were reviewed favorably in 2014, Realm started to gain traction. It was definitely a turning point.
In the meantime though, there was work to be done. As Realm gained solvency and traction over the next couple of years, we were able to add new vineyard sources and buy better barrels. Always refining, Benoit pulled back on barrel fermentation and began fermenting in stainless steel at cooler temperatures and experimenting with concrete. We started picking fruit earlier, seeking a fresher style of wine. The 2013 and 2014 vintages were solid, and the market reception was positive, which kept us growing.
Then in late 2015, a leap forward with the acquisition of the Hartwell property, including a winery and 20 acres of vineyard we could finally call home. 2017 brought wildfires and reduced yields, but the wines produced that year are strong. In 2018 another milestone with the partnership of Realm and Frank Farella, giving us a second Estate vineyard and farming control over Farella Vineyard.
Better vineyard sourcing, more control in the cellar, new equipment, better barrel storage, and ultimately, owning and farming our own vineyards – it all shows in the wines we tasted from 2012 onward, with each vintage an improvement upon the last. Even as we’ve grown production of The Bard, the wine has remained one of the most exciting in our portfolio, a benchmark wine that continues to “punch above its weight.” The tasting showed how our Beckstoffer To Kalon, ever a beacon of Napa Valley quality, has evolved as we’ve recognized the diversity within the vineyard. Vintners used to treat To Kalon as a monolith, but we’ve learned that an 89-acre vineyard is not the same throughout. We’re peeling back the layers, following veins of ancient rivers and beams of sunlight that give this vineyard its reputation. And no matter the vintage, this tasting proved once again that Beckstoffer Dr. Crane is always a revelation; in each successive flight Dr. Crane stopped us in our tracks and made spitting seem like heresy.
The importance of our growing Estate portfolio emerged through the tasting. We could literally taste the progression in Moonracer and Farella, both wines showing more precision in recent vintages as we get our hands and heads around the farming. Some of the earlier vintages of Farella, going back to 2010 and 2011, showed up as the sleeper of each flight – meaning surprisingly strong! We weren’t expecting it, but these wines exuded pure class and Cabernet character. Tasting older vintages of Farella, Moonracer and Houyi captured perfectly one of Shakespeare’s more quotable idioms, “What’s past is prologue …” We could not be more excited about the future of our Estate wines!
In addition to a chronicling of Realm, this tasting reminded us of the trajectory of Napa Valley wines over the past two decades. In the 2000s, still in the prime of the so-called cult era of Napa Valley, there was a formula: crop at two tons per acre, pick the fruit ripe, bleed some of the wine off the skins, maybe leave a hint of residual sugar, and barrel ferment in 100% new French oak. It was the style of that era (though to be clear, not all producers followed this path), and it was successful. But somewhere around 2010, a new era of Napa Valley emerged. People started looking for more freshness and finesse in the wines. You can taste this evolution in the Realm wines as we move from 2012 and 2013 to 2018 and 2019. From one year to the next, the evolution is small, but the cumulative effect is unmistakable. Today we’re opting for farming and winemaking techniques that produce fresher bottlings with more precision, wines that hopefully are less about ripeness and opulence and more about expressing the nuance of their origins. Wines that combine richness and freshness.
Benoit: “I love Realm’s older wines, and I think they still provide immense pleasure. But the evolution of our wines in the last decade is both gratifying and fascinating. Today I’m looking for purity and transparency, expressive wines that can easily age thirty years or more. That’s the Holy Grail.” Realm library vintage lineup.
When Winemakers Taste
August 19th, 2022
Nine Suns and Realm Houyi
When we acquired Nine Suns and the Houyi Vineyard in June 2022, the purchase included a small inventory of library wines going back to the first vintage (2011) as well as the unreleased 2019 vintage. Figuring the best way to gain insight into these wines was to taste them with the people who made them, we invited esteemed winemakers Sam Kaplan, Philippe Melka and Lloyd Matthews to taste through the wines with us. We also included the Realm Houyi Vineyard wines going back to 2013 so we could discuss both the signature of the site as well as the winemaker.
We gathered at Nine Suns on Pritchard Hill on a warm, sunny morning in August. For Sam, it was the first time he’d been back to the vineyard in a few years. Sam makes wine for Arkenstone, Memento Mori as well as his own brand, MAXEM, and was the consulting winemaker for Nine Suns from 2011-2016. He was instrumental in the design of the winery and integral to getting the brand off the ground. Philippe, proprietor of Melka Estates and Atelier Melka (with an A+ list of consulting clients) had been to Nine Suns more recently, having consulted on the wines from 2017-2021. Lloyd Matthews served as director of winemaking at Nine Suns from 2015-2021. As the person stationed at the winery all those years, Lloyd has perhaps the most intimate knowledge of the Houyi Vineyard and the wines produced by Nine Suns.
So, what is it like to taste through two verticals of wine with four winemakers in one room? It’s not a subdued affair, at least not with these four. The fact that two of them are French (Benoit and Philippe) and conducted side conversations in their native language made for a boisterous morning. There was a lot of joking, laughing and friendly kidding around. If we thought this would be a straightforward technical tasting that would produce complete tasting notes and commentary on each wine, we had another thing coming.
What we did get, however, were stories. Stories about rocks. Rocks on Pritchard Hill the size of Volkswagens. Rocks so big and unwieldy they destroyed not one but two D9 Caterpillars. Rocks that could make a grown man cry. (Yes, Pritchard Hill, Houyi Vineyard included, encompasses an exceedingly large volume of enormous rocks; the bar for planting a vineyard here is forbiddingly high.) We also heard stories about critically panned vintages, such as 2011, which actually produced many beautiful wines (Nine Suns included). And about heralded vintages, which may or may not have deserved the acclaim they received.
What we also got was the clear sense that Houyi was a vineyard each winemaker had been honored to work with. Sam talked about sitting down early on with legendary vineyard manager David Abreu, who pointed out that we are only temporary stewards of this place; Houyi will outlast us all. That’s a sentiment that certainly resonates with us. Philippe described Pritchard Hill as essentially an eastward extension of the Oakville hillside, home to so many other extraordinary vineyards. Benoit and Lloyd talked about their separate journeys with Houyi and how they both discovered a similar expression from the wines despite a different winemaking approach.
Tasting through the Nine Suns wines side by side with the Realm Houyi wines further confirmed what we already knew: Houyi has a distinct personality that can be identified in its wines. The descriptors that came up over and over again were violets, blue and red fruits, herbs de Provence and wild sage; lifted aromatics and wines that are somehow dense and weightless at the same time. To Benoit, another throughline with Houyi which became abundantly obvious during this tasting was the passion, care and pride of the people who have worked the land and made the wines through the years. For these four winemakers, the opportunity to taste wines they made years ago – and the chance to taste each other’s wines from the same vineyard - was a rarity. The respect among them was as palpable as the personality nuances that characterize each one.
We learned much about Houyi at this tasting, including how well the Nine Suns and Realm wines are aging. Having taken over the farming in January of this year, we’re excited to continue our journey with this vineyard and to prove we’re up to the challenge of realizing its great potential. We are thankful to the Chang family, founders of the Houyi Vineyard, who had the foresight to hold a few cases of wine back from each vintage. We are honored and excited to be able to share a few bottles of these library wines with our members during the 2022 Fall Release.
