Winemaker Notes
This wine is an excellent pairing with braised short ribs over garlicky mashed potatoes with parsnip and wilted spinach.
Professional Ratings
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Wine Enthusiast
Very rich and ripe, but also very firm and well built, this full-bodied wine has all the elements for great balance: robust and dry fruit flavors, good acidity, firm but not harsh tannins and appropriately strong alcohol. It's great to drink now with something rich and fatty, but will be best after 2020. Editors' Choice
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Wilfred Wong of Wine.com
A husky and powerful expression of the grape variety, the 2013 Vinum Cellars Scrapper comes through with the full force a fighter making a statement. The wine's bold black and jammy flavors pair it well with a juicy and thick ribeye. (Tasted: October 30, 2017, San Francisco, CA)
Cabernet Franc, a proud parent of Cabernet Sauvignon, is the subtler and more delicate of the Cabernets. Today Cabernet Franc produces outstanding single varietal wines across the wine-producing world. Somm Secret—One of California's best-kept secrets is the Happy Canyon appellation of Santa Barbara. Here Cabernet Franc shines as a single varietal wine or in blends, expressing sumptuous fruit, savory aromas and polished tannins.
As home to California’s highest altitude vineyards, El Dorado is also one of its oldest wine growing regions. When gold miners settled here in the late 1800s, many also planted vineyards and made wine to quench its local demand.
By 1870, El Dorado County, as part of the greater Sierra Foothills growing area, was among the largest wine producers in the state, behind only Los Angeles and Sonoma counties. The local wine industry enjoyed great success until just after the turn of the century when fortune-seekers moved elsewhere and its population diminished. With Prohibition, winemaking and grape growing was totally abandoned. But some of these vines still exist today and are the treasure chest of the Sierra Foothills as we know them.
El Dorado has a diverse terrain with elevations ranging from 1,200 to 3,500 feet, creating countless mesoclimates for its vineyards. This diversity allows success with a wide range of grapes including whites like Gewurztraminer and Sauvignon Blanc, as well as for reds, Grenache, Syrah, Tempranillo, Barbera and especially, Zinfandel.
Soils tend to be fine-grained volcanic rock, shale and decomposed granite. Summer days are hot but nights are cool and the area typically gets ample precipitation in the form or rain or snow in the winter.