MOCK SOMM:  2015 Malbec – Farrow Ranch – Devil Proof Vineyards – Alexander Valley, Sonoma County

Where do I start with the latest Devil Proof dissemination…. First word I wrote the other night was “indescribable”.  And essentially it is.  But I’ll try, remembering not only that initial meteoric octave in the olfactory sway and romance of her smokey, leather-pulsed, and wildly rich tell and grip.  But then, everything after that…. I didn’t want to pair it with dinner, but I did, just from my inability to resist her, further, with the poetic molding of my senses to the way she posed in the glass— vampiric hue, simplified and prolix winks and suggestion.  Only letting self have a small kiss from bottle, to align with dish, then after consider the enrapturing apparition more closely.

Pouring full glass, spin, watch her motions, the wait driving me mad but the wait as well giving me time to think about my approach.  Last time I had Devil Proof, I was bewitched, smitten, interested beyond any other label interest I’ve logged.  First…. Immediate impact, a swarm of notes that I don’t know how to reconcile… I just sat there in my hotel room agog with what spoke to me… she, again… my smiling seraph, the woman encouraging me to not think so hard about the act of glass-tilt, not with this bottle, not with the ’15…. “Just let me sing to you.” She apprised.  Dark chocolate covered cherry scales and separated notes, a Coltrane tune that keeps me in my seat, listening, tasting, feeling.  More than with any other Malbec.

I’ve always seen Malbec as that varietal that so many winemakers want to say they’ve made.  “Oh, I did a single vineyard Malbec from Dry Creek…” My reaction is always, “Really.” Why actuate and release such an effort if the thesis isn’t clear, innovative?  With this ’15, even more than the last bottle I had, which I think may have been from 2013, has me closer—  Listening, writing, seeing it on every table if I could.  I sat in a helix of stratospheric interest, love, and a bit of anxiety.  Should I just be sipping this Cubist and ravishingly ideological bottle as I am, just sipping and scribbling?  Again she told me, “Stop.”

More into her roll and stroll, telling what she wished told, I noticed more prominence to the fruit, smoke, coy but kindly assertive vanilla, maybe a little illusory, ostensible lavender.  Becoming more an encircling atmosphere, presence.  This is where I found myself scribbling madly as I do when with a wine like this, which isn’t often, not in this intensity, extremity, poetic immensity.  Everything from the structure to the organization and mobile assembly of piquant punctuation… oh, there was just amour.  All geometries and equations, theses and declarative hits from her… I smiled with her, leaned my head slightly to look out the window at Sonoma County and herald the vineyard blocks for composing something like her.  More than ‘something’, but a deconstructive revelation, affirmation, aptly singing to me, right there, in that hotel room.  “Nothing can harm me.  She’s here.” I thought .  “We smile together, sip symphonically.”