2005 Palazzo Wine Red

Palazzo is a small-batch producer of Merlot-based red blends intended to pay homage to the great Right Bank Bordeaux of St. Émilion. The Napa Valley estate is relatively new, offering its first release in 2005. But its roots go back more than 30 years, when Scott Palazzo was a young American traveling the world with a guitar on his back. A couple of years of living in France and picking grapes left Palazzo with a serious love of Right Bank Bordeaux, but he spent the next decades in the music business back in the U.S. By the early 2000s he was ready to launch into the wine business, and with the help of veteran winemaker Peter Franus Palazzo focused on wine sourced from Carneros fruit. The rolling hills of Carneros and south Napa Valley remind him of St. Émilion, and the results have been impressive. He makes three cuveés. The Right Bank Proprietary Red is his flagship Merlot-based blend. He also makes 100% Cabernet Franc and a white Semillon-based wine. In only a few years his wines have earned high marks from reviewers. Robert M. Parker Jr. has written that Palazzo’s wines are “all well-known among wine insiders, but probably (are) not getting the notice among consumers that they merit.”

Napa Valley AVA is the most famous winemaking region in the United States and one of the most prestigious in the world. With nearly 43,000 acres of vineyards and more than 300 wineries, it is the heart of fine wine production in the United States. Winemaking started in Napa in 1838 when George C. Yount planted grapes and began producing wine commercially. Other winemaking pioneers followed in the late 19th century, including the founders of Charles Krug, Schramsberg, Inglenook and Beaulieu Vineyards. An infestation of phylloxera, an insect that attacks vine roots, and the onset of Prohibition nearly wiped out the nascent Napa wine industry in the early 20th century. But by the late 1950s and early 1960s Robert Mondavi and other visionaries were producing quality wines easily distinguishable from the mass-produced jug wines made in California’s Central Valley. Napa Valley’s AVA was established in 1983, and today there are 16 sub-appellations within the Napa Valley AVA. Many grapes grow well in Napa’s Mediterranean climate, but the region is best known for Cabernet Sauvignon. Chardonnay is also very successfully cultivated, and about 30% of the AVA’s acreage is planted to white grapes, with the majority of those grapes being Chardonnay,