Standing Around Looking Magnificent
TASTING NOTES: “Dark purple in hue, this wine has a concentrated aromatic profile, featuring blackberries and vanilla. The wine is lush with flavors of sweet plum and Bing cherries and shows great balance and elegance for a wine of its density.” (AbV 16%, pH 3.62, TA .61)
VARIETALS: Zinfandel
BARRELS: 5% new American Oak, 15% once-used French Oak & 80% neutral
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Carpoforo.
The name “Carpoforo” belongs to a third-century Christian martyr — a Roman soldier who converted, was tortured, and eventually executed for his faith, which is a pretty rough biography by any standard. But Carpoforo is also, delightfully, the name of a character in La Cage aux Folles — the 1978 French-Italian comedy that became a Broadway musical, then the 1996 Robin Williams film The Birdcage. Carpoforo is the houseboy. He’s barely in it. He mostly just stands around looking magnificent while chaos unfolds around him.
That’s the thing about names with history. You load a single word with a martyr, a houseboy, a saint’s feast day, and a Paso Robles Zinfandel, and suddenly it’s doing a lot of work. The Hearst Ranch winery named this wine after a small creek on the property — Carpoforo Creek — which itself presumably got the name from some long-ago Spanish mission influence filtering through California’s colonial nomenclature. Place names are like that out here. You pull on one thread and you end up somewhere in third-century Rome before you’ve finished your first glass.
