Andrew Chalk: Recap of Quintessa Wine Dinner at Abacus

Mr. Chalk talks.

We continue our survey of Dallas wine tastings and dinners, hoping to bring the interesting ones your          attention. Three weeks ago we went to Jimmy’s Food Store for a tasting of Italian wines. Two weeks ago we went to Urban Crust for a Spanish wine tasting. This week we visited Kent Rathbun’s Abacus for a tasting of wines from Quintessa, a boutique winery in Napa led by the winemaker, Charles Thomas.

Charles Thomas has a dream job. As Director of Vineyards and Winemaking at Quintessa in Rutherford, California he makes wine at a small winery that is focused on quality. Winery owner, Agustin Huneeus, makes the resources available to achieve these goals. Huneeus and his wife, Valeria, bought the property without a vine on it in 1989. This allowed them to start with a clean slate and choose how to prepare the land for vineyards and how to plant the wines. They planted in 1990 and 1991, eventually producing the first vintage in 1994. A winery was not built on the premises until 2002, although you could miss it, even today, as it is designed to be inconspicuous within the folds of the Napa hills. Internally, it is built on ‘gravity flow’ principles. That is, grapes enter at the highest point and no force, other than gravity, moves ‘things’ until wine appears at the bottom.

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