As I gather up the wine for tonight’s 29th annual JPR wine tasting fundraiser I am struck right away by a clear sign of my own wine’s process of evolution. The 2005 Velocity and the 2007 Velo are virtually the same wine by the numbers (a little over half Malbec, the rest Cabernet, Cabernet franc, and Syrah) yet they are such distinctly different wines. Within two vintages I had honed the decision of which grape varietals from which vineyard blocks to use, so that I was working with essentially the same grapes which warranted bottling under the Velocity label in 2005.

Looking at the first five or six vintages of Velocity and Velo is like looking at the steepest part of a graph of evolutionary change. In the beginning I hoped that Malbec would play an important role in the blend, but did not imagine that it could dominate as successfully as it does now. I feel now more than ever that it was a wise decision to let the wine follow its own natural path, and not to try to force the style into some predetermined recipe imported from another winegrowing region.