Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Last Call Territory, 10/21/2018

  (Puget Purveyors Cabernet Sauvignon) Hello friends. Last month, our tasting team decided to open a pair of our value private label wines from the 2015 vintage, and my goodness are these two drinking beautifully right now. ’15 is such a charming vintage for early consumption. No surprise: they moved through a bunch of cases, to the point where I’d now put each of these into last call territory:Originally offered in March 2017, and we haven’t reoffered this in more than a year. We’ve sold through 94% of the original stash, so this is dwindling quickly now. Here’s a review that came in after that original offer: Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. And here are excerpts from the original: Puget Purveyors uses declassified barrels and puncheons of Block Wines Cabernet Sauvignon (from Discovery Vineyard Block 1) as the foundation, and then blends in more approachable, openly delicious Cab from one of our other long-term winery partners. For many years, Champoux Vineyard has proven that the Horse Heaven Hills is a wonderful area for growing Cab in Washington. Discovery is just a bit south of Champoux, right on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. The proximity to the river, and the steeper slope, both help with frost problems. Wind also whips up off the Columbia, gently dehydrating grapes and leading to little buckshot Cabernet berries with very high skin-to-juice ratio, which leads to incredible tannic structure in finished Cabernets from Discovery. This vineyard is just entering its teenage years, and the results so far have been staggering. I’m thrilled that we’re locked into Discovery Cabernet for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned, Disco Cabernet is imposing in its structure, so we really needed some fleshy, delicious, approachable fruit for blending. Fortunately, our partners at [REDACTED] Winery came through for us, with lovely Cabernet, mostly from [REDACTED] Vineyard. Why the double redaction? The usual reason: this is very good fruit from a very good winery, and blurting their name out with a twenty dollar wine doesn’t make anyone happy. Suffice it to say it’s a long-time Full Pull partner, well loved by our list members. This clocks in at 14.5% listed alc and begins with a nose combining deep dark fruit (black plum, crème de cassis) with subtleties of the kind of graphitic minerality that only the best Horse Heaven Hills vineyards provide. On the palate, it’s the texture you notice first: the sturdy scaffolding of black-tea tannin from Discovery paired to fleshy, delicious Cabernet fruit. What makes me happy is that this is a balanced four-corners Cab, hitting fruit, earth, savory, and barrel notes in turn. The finish is all Earl Grey tannin goodness, kissed with bergamot.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Instant Gratification 8 of 8: Ring Out (Final Offer of 2017), 12/23/2017

  (Puget Purveyors Cabernet Sauvignon) Holiday Pickup Schedule REMINDER: Please take note of our schedule below for the end of 2017 and beginning of 2018: Dec 23 (TODAY): Open 11am-7pm Dec 28-30: CLOSED Jan 4-6: CLOSED Jan 11-13: Open 11am-7pm ---- Hello friends. This is our final offer of 2017. We’ll plan to stay out of your inboxes until about January 7, when you can expect our first offer of 2018. In the meantime, after our open hours today (Saturday; 11am-7pm) we are CLOSED for pickups for the next few weeks, and our first TPU pickup day in 2017 will be Thursday January 11. Today’s offer will mostly focus on reflections from a busy 2017. At the end of the offer we’ll include reorder links for a handful of our in-house favorites; and at the beginning we’ll do what we’ve done every year since 2009: excerpt Tennyson’s In Memoriam. Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, The flying cloud, the frosty light; The year is dying in the night; Ring out, wild bells, and let him die. Ring out the old, ring in the new, Ring, happy bells, across the snow: The year is going, let him go; Ring out the false, ring in the true. Ring out the grief that saps the mind, For those that here we see no more, Ring out the feud of rich and poor, Ring in redress to all mankind. I love quoting these particular stanzas, because they speak to the cleansing grace of the end of a year, the power of first remembering and then letting go. One memory that stands out to me from 2017 was our team’s September trip with Morgan Lee to visit all the vineyards we work with for our in-house winery, Block Wines. This was the first year that we were able to bring nearly our entire team on that eastern Washington swing, and it led to all sorts of interesting conversations, several of them sober even. And I remember Pat making the point – after seeing all these pristine, carefully-tended vineyards and tasting all these perfect grape berries ripening on the vine – that the raw materials we start with in the Pacific Northwest are truly beautiful, and that the role of the winemakers is to convey that beauty in the finished wines. Our job at Full Pull is to suss out the winemakers who are achieving the honest expression of this rigorous farming, and to shield our list members from all the rest. I see our role as that of the curator/matchmaker: the curator side tasting broadly so that you don’t have to; the matchmaker side connecting the best winemakers in the northwest (and a few in the rest of the world) to a group of people who care about the beverages they consume. And that’s what always strikes me about our list members. In a world where cool detachment seems to be in the ascendancy, our list members are a countercultural group who choose to *care* about something. In this case, it’s wine, but it’s the caring itself that’s telling of the kind of folks who populate our list. Our Full Pull team feels very fortunate to have such a thoughtful, engaged, kind group of people as our list members. Thank you all for such robust support in 2017. Now then, let’s do this quixotic thing we do – attempting to use language to convey sensory experience – one more time, and then let’s close the door on 2017.Originally offered in March 2017, and we haven’t reoffered this in more than a year. We’ve sold through 94% of the original stash, so this is dwindling quickly now. Here’s a review that came in after that original offer: Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. And here are excerpts from the original: Puget Purveyors uses declassified barrels and puncheons of Block Wines Cabernet Sauvignon (from Discovery Vineyard Block 1) as the foundation, and then blends in more approachable, openly delicious Cab from one of our other long-term winery partners. For many years, Champoux Vineyard has proven that the Horse Heaven Hills is a wonderful area for growing Cab in Washington. Discovery is just a bit south of Champoux, right on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. The proximity to the river, and the steeper slope, both help with frost problems. Wind also whips up off the Columbia, gently dehydrating grapes and leading to little buckshot Cabernet berries with very high skin-to-juice ratio, which leads to incredible tannic structure in finished Cabernets from Discovery. This vineyard is just entering its teenage years, and the results so far have been staggering. I’m thrilled that we’re locked into Discovery Cabernet for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned, Disco Cabernet is imposing in its structure, so we really needed some fleshy, delicious, approachable fruit for blending. Fortunately, our partners at [REDACTED] Winery came through for us, with lovely Cabernet, mostly from [REDACTED] Vineyard. Why the double redaction? The usual reason: this is very good fruit from a very good winery, and blurting their name out with a twenty dollar wine doesn’t make anyone happy. Suffice it to say it’s a long-time Full Pull partner, well loved by our list members. This clocks in at 14.5% listed alc and begins with a nose combining deep dark fruit (black plum, crème de cassis) with subtleties of the kind of graphitic minerality that only the best Horse Heaven Hills vineyards provide. On the palate, it’s the texture you notice first: the sturdy scaffolding of black-tea tannin from Discovery paired to fleshy, delicious Cabernet fruit. What makes me happy is that this is a balanced four-corners Cab, hitting fruit, earth, savory, and barrel notes in turn. The finish is all Earl Grey tannin goodness, kissed with bergamot.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull In-House Reoffers, 8/4/2017

  (Puget Purveyors Cabernet Sauvignon) Hello friends. Today we’re reoffering two of our house wines, one with a glowing new review from Jeb Dunnuck’s annual set for Wine Advocate; the other a funky beauty getting down to last-call territory.Originally offered in March 2017, and we haven’t reoffered this in more than a year. We’ve sold through 94% of the original stash, so this is dwindling quickly now. Here’s a review that came in after that original offer: Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. And here are excerpts from the original: Puget Purveyors uses declassified barrels and puncheons of Block Wines Cabernet Sauvignon (from Discovery Vineyard Block 1) as the foundation, and then blends in more approachable, openly delicious Cab from one of our other long-term winery partners. For many years, Champoux Vineyard has proven that the Horse Heaven Hills is a wonderful area for growing Cab in Washington. Discovery is just a bit south of Champoux, right on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. The proximity to the river, and the steeper slope, both help with frost problems. Wind also whips up off the Columbia, gently dehydrating grapes and leading to little buckshot Cabernet berries with very high skin-to-juice ratio, which leads to incredible tannic structure in finished Cabernets from Discovery. This vineyard is just entering its teenage years, and the results so far have been staggering. I’m thrilled that we’re locked into Discovery Cabernet for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned, Disco Cabernet is imposing in its structure, so we really needed some fleshy, delicious, approachable fruit for blending. Fortunately, our partners at [REDACTED] Winery came through for us, with lovely Cabernet, mostly from [REDACTED] Vineyard. Why the double redaction? The usual reason: this is very good fruit from a very good winery, and blurting their name out with a twenty dollar wine doesn’t make anyone happy. Suffice it to say it’s a long-time Full Pull partner, well loved by our list members. This clocks in at 14.5% listed alc and begins with a nose combining deep dark fruit (black plum, crème de cassis) with subtleties of the kind of graphitic minerality that only the best Horse Heaven Hills vineyards provide. On the palate, it’s the texture you notice first: the sturdy scaffolding of black-tea tannin from Discovery paired to fleshy, delicious Cabernet fruit. What makes me happy is that this is a balanced four-corners Cab, hitting fruit, earth, savory, and barrel notes in turn. The finish is all Earl Grey tannin goodness, kissed with bergamot.

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Puget Purveyors, 3/15/2017

  (Puget Purveyors Cabernet Sauvignon) Hello friends. Today we have the release of a new in-house wine with an audacious goal: to make the finest $20 Washington Cabernet Sauvignon that our nature and terroir allow: Originally offered in March 2017, and we haven’t reoffered this in more than a year. We’ve sold through 94% of the original stash, so this is dwindling quickly now. Here’s a review that came in after that original offer: Wine Advocate: Copyrighted material withheld. And here are excerpts from the original: Puget Purveyors uses declassified barrels and puncheons of Block Wines Cabernet Sauvignon (from Discovery Vineyard Block 1) as the foundation, and then blends in more approachable, openly delicious Cab from one of our other long-term winery partners. For many years, Champoux Vineyard has proven that the Horse Heaven Hills is a wonderful area for growing Cab in Washington. Discovery is just a bit south of Champoux, right on a bluff overlooking the Columbia River. The proximity to the river, and the steeper slope, both help with frost problems. Wind also whips up off the Columbia, gently dehydrating grapes and leading to little buckshot Cabernet berries with very high skin-to-juice ratio, which leads to incredible tannic structure in finished Cabernets from Discovery. This vineyard is just entering its teenage years, and the results so far have been staggering. I’m thrilled that we’re locked into Discovery Cabernet for the foreseeable future. As I mentioned, Disco Cabernet is imposing in its structure, so we really needed some fleshy, delicious, approachable fruit for blending. Fortunately, our partners at [REDACTED] Winery came through for us, with lovely Cabernet, mostly from [REDACTED] Vineyard. Why the double redaction? The usual reason: this is very good fruit from a very good winery, and blurting their name out with a twenty dollar wine doesn’t make anyone happy. Suffice it to say it’s a long-time Full Pull partner, well loved by our list members. This clocks in at 14.5% listed alc and begins with a nose combining deep dark fruit (black plum, crème de cassis) with subtleties of the kind of graphitic minerality that only the best Horse Heaven Hills vineyards provide. On the palate, it’s the texture you notice first: the sturdy scaffolding of black-tea tannin from Discovery paired to fleshy, delicious Cabernet fruit. What makes me happy is that this is a balanced four-corners Cab, hitting fruit, earth, savory, and barrel notes in turn. The finish is all Earl Grey tannin goodness, kissed with bergamot.