Founder's Month | Library Selection | CORLEY Magnums 'Vintage 2014'

As we celebrate Founder's Month this July, we're pulling some wonderful wines from the library. Tasting back through these older wines truly reflects our long-thinking commitments to our stewardship of the land that our Founder Jay Corley started more than 50 years ago. These library selections were specifically made to improve over time, and to age gracefully for +20 years.
 
This week, we're focusing on the 2014 vintage, specifically our CORLEY selections bottled in magnums. Here is some additional information on this terrific vintage, including vintage commentary, general tasting notes, and some thoughts about aging wine in magnums. 

VINTAGE 2014 NOTES : The 2013/2014 winter was one of the driest on record in California and rainfall totals in the Napa Valley were approximately half of normal. However, the timing could not have been better : heavy rains in late February and early March gave a much-needed drink of water to the vines as they were emerging from dormancy and about to begin bud break. Furthermore, the spring was warm allowing vintners and growers to save water if needed for irrigation rather than using it for frost protection. And finally, while the vines used for high-quality wine production generally don’t need much water, a benefit of the drought is that berry sizes are typically smaller and have more concentrated flavors, which contributed to the overall quality of this year’s harvest. As it relates to Cabernet Sauvignon and Bordeaux-inspired blends, our wines from 2014 are some of the best of the last decade, deep in complexity, texture, flavor and aroma. In general, the wines have an appropriate balance of tannin which allows them to be approachable in their youth, but will enable them to age gracefully for 20+ years.

The Napa earthquake on August 24 was an exciting prelude for the vintage! While it created a lot of cleanup work for us leading into the harvest, it had no direct impact on the quality of the wines from 2014. This picture is the actual barrel room where we stored our barrels in 2014. Our barrels are not in this picture, we were fortunate to have had our barrels stored next to the wall on the north end of the building ... when the earthquake struck, most of our barrels were prevented from falling by the northern walls.

In upcoming posts, we're excited to share some more details about specific wines from the terrific 2014 vintage. In the meantime, for more information on availability of any of these special wines, please visit CORLEY Library Wines | Vintage 2014.