Winemaker Notes
The fruit aromas of the Four Flags are fresh and focused, with blueberry, red currant, and pomegranate mingling with barrel notes of cocoa nibs and wood smoke. Sourced solely from Red Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon, this wine beautifully showcases the typicity of the AVA, with inviting notes of cedar, lavender, and bay leaf. The palate offers generous flavors, with chocolate-covered cherries and tapenade carried by fresh acidity. Ample, fine-grained tannins carry the flavors through a lengthy finish, promising many years of graceful aging.
Professional Ratings
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Wine & Spirits
Four Flags brings together two of Red Mountain’s iconic vineyard sources, Klipsun and Ciel du Cheval, with two younger estates, Grand Ciel and Upchurch Vineyards. When first poured it feels like a Red Mountain brute: big, burly, a touch thick, quite possibly over the top. But air brings savory touches to all that fruited expanse, notes of violet, briar and green olive all serving to shine a light into the wine’s brooding depths. With a good acid lift and tannins, it will perform at its peak with an herb-rubbed steak.
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Jeb Dunnuck
The 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Four Flags comes from four separate vineyards on Red Mountain and is brought up mostly in new French oak. Its deep purple hue is followed by rock star notes of crème de cassis, toasted spices, lead pencil, crushed, and savory herbs. It’s beautiful on the palate as well and offers medium to full-bodied richness, impeccable balance, and a great finish. It will ideally be given 2-4 years of bottle age and will have two decades of overall longevity.
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Robert Parker's Wine Advocate
Made from a blend of the four vineyards on Red Mountain—the Ciel du Cheval, Grand Ciel, Klipsun and Upchurch vineyards—the 2017 Cabernet Sauvignon Four Flags has an even balance of mineral tension, freshness of fruit and elegant baking spices on the nose. Trying the other bottles of the range side by side, I can see the identity of the Four Flags, as each vineyard imparts flavors into the wine, like completing a puzzle to discover and display an image. Medium to full-bodied, the wine expresses blackberry skin, dusty red cherry, savory dried spices and elements of baked earth, with firm tannins across the mid-palate and ending with expressions of dried currants and crushed rocks. Rating: 93+
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
COMMENTARY: The 2017 DeLille Cellars Four Flags Cabernet Sauvignon offers excellent abundance on the palate. TASTING NOTES: This wine deftly combines aromas and flavors of black fruit and savory spices. Enjoy it with a well-seasoned, oven-baked Porchetta. (Tasted: November 2, 2020, San Francisco, CA)
A noble variety bestowed with both power and concentration, Cabernet Sauvignon enjoys success all over the globe, its best examples showing potential to age beautifully for decades. Cabernet Sauvignon flourishes in Bordeaux's Medoc where it is often blended with Merlot and smaller amounts of some combination of Cabernet Franc, Malbecand Petit Verdot. In the Napa Valley, ‘Cab’ is responsible for some of the world’s most prestigious, age-worthy and sought-after “cult” wines. Somm Secret—DNA profiling in 1997 revealed that Cabernet Sauvignon was born from a spontaneous crossing of Cabernet Franc and Sauvignon Blanc in 17th century southwest France.
A coveted source of top quality red grapes among premier Washington producers, the Red Mountain AVA is actually the smallest appellation in the state. As its name might suggest, it is actually neither a mountain nor is it composed of red earth. Instead the appellation is an anticline of the Yakima fold belt, a series of geologic folds that define a number of viticultural regions in the surrounding area. It is on the eastern edge of Yakima Valley with slopes facing southwest towards the Yakima River, ideal for the ripening of grapes. The area’s springtime proliferation of cheatgrass, which has a reddish color, actually gives the area the name, "Red" Mountain.
Red Mountain produces some of the most mineral-driven, tannic and age-worthy red wines of Washington and there are a few reasons for this. It is just about the hottest appellation with normal growing season temperatures commonly reaching above 90F. The soil is particularly poor in nutrients and has a high pH, which results in significantly smaller berry sizes compared to varietal norms. The low juice to skin ratio in smaller berries combined with the strong, dry summer winds, leads to higher tannin levels in Red Mountain grapes.
The most common red grape varieties here are Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Cabernet Franc and Syrah, among others. Limited white varieties are grown, namely Sauvignon blanc.
The reds of the area tend to express dark black and blue fruit, deep concentration, complex textures, high levels of tannins and as previously noted, have good aging capabilities.