I make it my business to keep my eye on new California wineries, especially in Napa and Sonoma, as much as I can given the fact that I do a lot of other things besides write about wine. Whenever possible, I like to taste the first releases from these wineries. They are not always fantastic – some are good, some show potential, and some simply need to be written off as first efforts and retried again later. That’s the thing about wines, just because they’re not good now, that doesn’t mean they won’t be later, and, of course, vice versa.
It’s quite rare, however, for the very first vintage of a wine to knock my socks off. But when I got my first taste of Blackbird Vineyards out of the barrel a couple of years ago, I quite literally couldn’t bring myself to spit it out. I was immediately in love. And how delightful and against all odds that the best Napa wine I had tasted in many months was a Merlot.
Blackbird proprietor Michael Polenske is used to beating the odds unexpectedly. By all accounts he never should have gotten into wine in the first place. Spending one’s teens and early twenties in a fraternity at Chico State generally favors the the cultivation of a strong affinity for beer and bikinis rather than fine wine. But in between his finance classes, thanks in part to a roommate who turned him on to wine, he dabbled in the wine curriculum and spent weekends exploring Napa Valley visiting what were becoming his favorite wineries.
When he graduated from college, Polenske again took an unexpected turn, getting into the pragmatic financial planning industry just as everyone in that industry was moving towards more active money management. Polenske had the bright idea that he could do financial planning for people in the wine business, and so managed to find a firm in the Midwest that was willing to give him Napa and Sonoma as a territory. In addition to the territory of his choice, they also asked him if he’d be willing to cover the zip code 94025 as well.
It turned out that there wasn’t much interest in wine country, but Polenske found quite a lot of both interest and money in that other little zip code, which happened to be Atherton, California, and for which he found himself the sole representative in his company. Through a lot of trial and error, a ton of cold calling, and a significant amount of elbow grease, Polenske spent 10 years building a sizeable book of business in Silicon Valley, learning more about and continuing to fall deeper in love with wine in the process.
And then one day, relatively out of the blue, JP Morgan called and offered him a job as a private banker. Like a small town kid picked up out of high school by the Major Leagues, Polenske walked starry eyed into his first day at work, sat down next to his colleagues with their Wharton, Kellog, Harvard, and GSB diplomas on their desks, and when no one showed up to tell him how to do his job, he just did what he knew how to do. He started making calls.
At the time, the average JP Morgan banker brought on between seven and nine new clients per year. At the end of his first year Polenske had 35, a figure so shocking at the time, that executives at the highest levels of the company told his manager to get him on a global conference call so they could demand an explanation. Based on that call JP Morgan changed its approach to new client acquisition, and it wasn’t long before Polenske was in charge of the San Francisco office, and beginning to dabble in his other interests, including antiques (he would eventually go on to own Patina Atelier Antiques in San Francisco).
As Polenske’s star continued to rise in the financial services world, he kept his eye on Napa, thinking that someday it might be nice to build a lifestyle business. But each time he nearly got to the point of buying some land, another job opportunity would come along, and he’d be swept up into running a new company, division, or fund.
After years of almost buying vineyards, Polenske eventually decided to scrap the idea, and instead simply settle for a house on a hill in Napa with a pool. He ended up with a couple of houses on the flats, and a 10 acre vineyard. These things happen.
Napa has a way of turning people into winemakers overnight simply because they stumble on the right piece of property. Polenske’s acquisition, as you might expect, was a little more strategic than that. Call it a compulsion to seek out the undervalued parts of the market, or just call it instinct, but Polenske found himself staring at a Merlot vineyard that was selling fruit to prominent buyers who were making 90 point wines from it, yet the prices they were paying for the fruit were below market rates. Never mind that Merlot was on the down and out. Polenske saw the raw ingredients for the perfect boutique wine brand, and his idle fantasies about building a lifestyle business instead of another hedge fund began to crystallize. The vineyard was named Blackbird, and when Polenske found out that in French Patois Merlot means “little blackbird” the key turned in the lock and everything fell into place.
Today, with the help of winemaker Sarah Gott and winegrower Aaron Pott, Polenske farms the 10 acre estate vineyard to produce 1120 cases of a wine he has decided to call a Proprietary Red, though the wine will likely always be 90+ percent Merlot. Though it technically could be labeled Merlot, Polenske is keeping his options open to adjust the blend in the future, and doing a little bit of marketing by aligning the name with some of the big guns like Harlan Estate and Rudd who also produce wines with the same designation.
In 2005 the wine contained 96% Merlot and 4% Cabernet Sauvignon from the estate’s 11 year old vines in Napa’s Oak Knoll District. After meticulous sorting and careful crushing and fermentation, the wine ages for 20 months in French oak barrels of which 70% are new and 30% are older. The wine is bottled completely unfined and unfiltered.
In addition to this wine, in 2005 the estate has begun producing a rosé called Arriviste and a 50/50 Cabernet blend called Paramour.
Tasting Notes:
Dark ruby in color, this wine has an expressive nose of aromas of espresso and mocha, black cherries and chocolate. In the mouth the wine is nothing sort of gorgeous. At once explosively juicy and simultaneously rich and layered, beautiful, near-perfect acidity allows bright cherry fruit and spices to float above a deep resonant base of tobacco and earth flavors that all somehow meld and flex until they’re a vibrating chord through a stellar finish. This wine practically defines “delicious” and cellared well, will likely do so for 10 to 15 years.
Food Pairing:
Extremely food friendly because of its bright acidity, this wine will pair well with a lot of foods. I’d enjoy it with beef short ribs and horseradish potatoes.
Overall Score: 9.5
How Much?: $80
This wine is available for purchase on the internet.
