Online wine magazine Palate Press interviews owner Kashy Khaledi and winemaker Steve Matthiasson to explore how Ashes & Diamonds is challenging the monoculture of Napa Valley by blending old with new, focusing not only on the next-generation tastes of millennials, but looking back to the greatest Napa Cabs of the ’60s.
“We’re really trying to dive into what Napa Cab in the ’60s and ’70s tasted like,” Matthiasson comments. “We picked it at 21.5 Brix [the 2015 average in Napa was 26, or about 15% ABV], but we let it get real hot at fermentation because they didn’t have temperature control then. This wine’s a time capsule.”