Smoke Taint Reframed As 'Savory Complexity'

Following an extensive internal tasting and a considerably more extensive conversation with marketing, Bellweather Estate announced Thursday that the ashy character present in its 2020 Cabernet would henceforth be understood as savory complexity, sources confirmed. “There’s a real campfire, cured-meat, old-world quality here that frankly you cannot engineer,” said winemaker Josh Prieto, describing a quality that had in fact been engineered by a fire. “Consumers have been asking for less fruit-forward wines for years. We listened.” Prieto added that the wine would be released under a new label celebrating resilience, and that the guaiacol numbers were a matter for the lab, not the palate.