Kinsman Inaugural Release

Anyone else on the release or have had an early taste? It’s set for Wed May 22.

It is with great excitement we ask you to please save a date on your calendar for our pre-release offering. Next Wednesday, May 22 at 8am PDT the offer will open, allowing us to share the very first vintage of our maiden wine project. It will close midnight, June 5, 2019.

Included in this offer will be two single-vineyard wines from the stellar 2016 vintage: Anjea Cabernet Sauvignon (Sleeping Lady Vineyard, Yountville) and Rhadamanthus Cabernet Blend (former Reverie Vineyard, Diamond Mountain District).

With limited production from 2016 we are sadly unable to guarantee allocations, so we encourage you to order early during the release period. For ease of ordering, we invite you to log in to your account in advance to set a password and enter your address and payment details, if you have not already done so.

You are part of a small subset of our mailing list with whom we are sharing this pre-release offer. Our hope is to be able to extend an offer to our entire mailing list during our inaugural release in the fall, but for now our priority is to ensure our earliest supporters are able to secure an allocation. We appreciate your discretion regarding this offer.

With gratitude (and a slight case of the jitters),
Shae & Nigel

I was in early, so I got the upcoming offer too. Looking forward to it!

Any idea of cost

Vinous has the release price for the Diamond Mountain at $235 and Sleeping Lady at $195. Both rated a 97.

So is this the next Macdonald or just another high price Napa cab ?

TIme will tell. It ain’t BTK fruit.

I’m in as well. Just wondering what price points are going to represent to you all:
(A) good value?
(B) too expensive?

Which wines were previously made with the fruit

Unlikely the latter because of who’s involved. I doubt MACDONALD is a fair comparison as it’s not To Kalon fruit and doesn’t have the history. Neither are issues to me. Will it have the same fervent following? Who knows.

Prices are around $200. Good pedigree, great vineyards, I’m in to get a 3-pack of each.

Anyone sign up and not get the offer ?

Pricing from Shae Kinsman.

2016 Anjea: $585/3pk

2016 Rhadamanthus: $705/3pk

Also, it is all purchased fruit. I have heard good things from folks in Valley about the project and the winemaker definitely has the pedigree coming from Araujo.

Two three packs after tax and shipping will be $1500 to my door. That is a pretty big nut to swallow on a first release project (even though great vineyards, vintage, review, etc.) and I don’t know if I need anymore $200 bottle of wine. If it was a pick your poison offering, I might give a 3 bottle mix a spin.

Steep price, will consider it but more likely wait for more reviews to come in.

I just met with Nigel and Shae on Tuesday and tasted many of their wines. We tasted the 2016 and 2017 Anijea, 2016 and 2017 Rhadamanthus, and then went through some 2018 barrel samples of the two vineyards and also of a new site that used to be part of the Araujo Eisle wine but became available after the French took over. All in all, we tasted 10 wines.

Nigel and Shae are just fantastic people and we had a great time learning about them and their new project. The wines are tremendous across the board. I took some notes but no formal tasting notes. It was great to see the wines across three vintages. Both the Anijea and Rhadamanthus wines have this amazing palate feel, that is balanced and long with a sort of nervous tension that is really intriguing. But they do that without being overly cloying or heavy. Their fruit expression is pure and fresh, with the Anijea being a little more red-toned and the Rhad being more dark fruited. I preferred the 2016 wines to the 2017, but only by a little. The 2018’s are rockstars and just wait for the new vineyard site to be released. These are superb wines, hands down. Cannot recommend them enough to everyone.

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Be an interesting test to measure a quality winemaker on the quality of wine between Araujo (Eisele) and Kinsman (Reverie/Sleeping Lady). Does the winemaker dominate or the vineyard? Does anyone know the quality of Reverie and Sleeping Lady?

The Rhadamanthus comes from the former Reverie Vineyard on Diamond Mountain, which is where the fruit for Lokoya’s Diamond Mountain comes from.

Benoit Touquette makes a beautiful Sleeping Lady with his personal Fait Main label.

I will be in for a three pack so that I can do a compare/contrast in a couple years between the two winemakers. Totally geeky I know, but I find it interesting to see how two people can create different interpretations of the same grapes and same vintage.

I’m out if it’s more expensive than things like Myriad’s, Piper’s, or Riverrain’s top wines. Those both get fruit from top sites.

To quote my grandmother, “Ich darf es vi a loch in kop." Or maybe it was, "Es felt mir vi a lokh in kop. " My yiddish isn’t very good and Google gives both.