Our Provenance Guarantee
Purchase with confidence. All of our wines are selectively sourced and thoroughly inspected for authenticity and signs of poor storage. Accepted bottles are preserved in our climate-controlled cellar until they reach your doorstep. We have no storefront and no walk-in traffic, so nothing is moved or handled between inspection and shipping.
The bottle you see photographed is the bottle you receive (or fundamentally identical when multiple bottles are listed), and our commitment to you is that it arrives as represented. If it doesn’t, we want to hear from you.
Tasting Notes:
96+ points — The Wine Independent
A wine with wonderful length and body. Intense and concentrated on the nose, with hints of ripe red fruit and plum, and expressions of raspberry and sweet strawberry dancing in harmony at the top of the glass. Sweet notes of black mission fig emerge over time, balanced by racy acidity. An instant crowd-pleaser when opened in its youth, but one that will benefit from time in the cellar. It develops softly with decanting and shows the continuous pedigree of this vineyard site of volcanic soil and elevation. Multiple passes through the vineyard allowed the Checkerboard team to be extremely meticulous and deliberate at harvest.
Cult Wines International Notes:
Checkerboard Vineyards occupies the south-east facing slope of Diamond Mountain, at the northern end of the Napa Valley. The appellation is among the smallest and most rarefied in Napa — barely 500 planted acres, all above 400 feet, spanning the fog-crested Mayacamas between St. Helena and Calistoga. The estate runs from the valley floor to the top of the ridge along a two-and-a-half-mile drive, taking in a winery, a cave and four vineyard sites of differing elevation, exposure and soil. Farming is sustainable throughout, with permanent cover crops in alternating rows, careful water monitoring and entomology used for pest control. The vineyards are managed by Jim Barbour, and the wines are made by Martha McClellan — formerly of Harlan Estate and Blankiet, and behind Sloan, Levy & McClellan, Vineyard 7&8 and Hamel — a winemaker known for painstaking precision.
Since 2006 Checkerboard has been drawn solely from the Aurora Vineyard, a twelve-acre parcel in a small valley midway up Diamond Mountain, set on a knoll at 1,200 feet. The knoll projects off the mountainside, giving full southern exposure, open light from east and west, and protection from the valley’s summer fog. Six acres sit in rich volcanic soil riddled with basalt cobble and loamy red clay; the other six in a deep, gravelly mix of white volcanic ash and chips of decomposed rhyolite washed down from the crags above. Those two soils are the source of the striking minerality and intense aromatics that have made this a genuine Napa cult wine — polished and glamorous in style, but unmistakably of the mountain.
Bottle Size:
750 mL
Storage History:
Always stored properly in a climate-controlled cellar.
Condition:
Perfect
