When we acquired Nine Suns and the Houyi Vineyard in June 2022, the purchase included a small inventory of library wines going back to the first vintage (2011) as well as the unreleased 2019 vintage. Figuring the best way to gain insight into these wines was to taste them with the people who made them, we invited esteemed winemakers Sam Kaplan, Philippe Melka and Lloyd Matthews to taste through the wines with us. We also included the Realm Houyi Vineyard wines going back to 2013 so we could discuss both the signature of the site as well as the winemaker.
We gathered at Nine Suns on Pritchard Hill on a warm, sunny morning in August. For Sam, it was the first time he’d been back to the vineyard in a few years. Sam makes wine for Arkenstone, Memento Mori as well as his own brand, MAXEM, and was the consulting winemaker for Nine Suns from 2011-2016. He was instrumental in the design of the winery and integral to getting the brand off the ground. Philippe, proprietor of Melka Estates and Atelier Melka (with an A+ list of consulting clients) had been to Nine Suns more recently, having consulted on the wines from 2017-2021. Lloyd Matthews served as director of winemaking at Nine Suns from 2015-2021. As the person stationed at the winery all those years, Lloyd has perhaps the most intimate knowledge of the Houyi Vineyard and the wines produced by Nine Suns.
So, what is it like to taste through two verticals of wine with four winemakers in one room? It’s not a subdued affair, at least not with these four. The fact that two of them are French (Benoit and Philippe) and conducted side conversations in their native language made for a boisterous morning. There was a lot of joking, laughing and friendly kidding around. If we thought this would be a straightforward technical tasting that would produce complete tasting notes and commentary on each wine, we had another thing coming.
What we did get, however, were stories. Stories about rocks. Rocks on Pritchard Hill the size of Volkswagens. Rocks so big and unwieldy they destroyed not one but two D9 Caterpillars. Rocks that could make a grown man cry. (Yes, Pritchard Hill, Houyi Vineyard included, encompasses an exceedingly large volume of enormous rocks; the bar for planting a vineyard here is forbiddingly high.) We also heard stories about critically panned vintages, such as 2011, which actually produced many beautiful wines (Nine Suns included). And about heralded vintages, which may or may not have deserved the acclaim they received.
What we also got was the clear sense that Houyi was a vineyard each winemaker had been honored to work with. Sam talked about sitting down early on with legendary vineyard manager David Abreu, who pointed out that we are only temporary stewards of this place; Houyi will outlast us all. That’s a sentiment that certainly resonates with us. Philippe described Pritchard Hill as essentially an eastward extension of the Oakville hillside, home to so many other extraordinary vineyards. Benoit and Lloyd talked about their separate journeys with Houyi and how they both discovered a similar expression from the wines despite a different winemaking approach.
Tasting through the Nine Suns wines side by side with the Realm Houyi wines further confirmed what we already knew: Houyi has a distinct personality that can be identified in its wines. The descriptors that came up over and over again were violets, blue and red fruits, herbs de Provence and wild sage; lifted aromatics and wines that are somehow dense and weightless at the same time. To Benoit, another throughline with Houyi which became abundantly obvious during this tasting was the passion, care and pride of the people who have worked the land and made the wines through the years. For these four winemakers, the opportunity to taste wines they made years ago – and the chance to taste each other’s wines from the same vineyard - was a rarity. The respect among them was as palpable as the personality nuances that characterize each one.
We learned much about Houyi at this tasting, including how well the Nine Suns and Realm wines are aging. Having taken over the farming in January of this year, we’re excited to continue our journey with this vineyard and to prove we’re up to the challenge of realizing its great potential. We are thankful to the Chang family, founders of the Houyi Vineyard, who had the foresight to hold a few cases of wine back from each vintage. We are honored and excited to be able to share a few bottles of these library wines with our members during the 2022 Fall Release.
