EXECUTIVE SUMMARY for those with short attention spans - Sign up for Russell Bevan’s new Adversity project. If you don’t listen to me, you can count yourselves among those who did not listen when I told people to sign up for the MacDonald list.
New Year’s day, 2006, I started a thread on the Ebob forum that said, more or less, “I’m spending today watching football games. What mailing lists should I sign up for while watching the games?” I signed up for way too many, and it gave me a push down the slippery slope to perdition.
Move forward to 2013. In July of that year, Bob Dentice organized a dinner for Graham MacDonald in Brooklyn and invited some people for “the first official tasting of his [Graeme’s] wines.” I was lucky to be invited. Bob hailed the wines, the group actually voted on what label Graeme should use, I wrote an over-the-top tasting note after making sure that I was on the mailing list before posting the note here, and the rest is history.
I have spent the intervening period jettisoning more mailing lists that any five normal people should join in a lifetime. All good wines, but you have to have some limits. Dumol, Williams Selyem, Schrader, Sea Smoke, Kosta Browne, Colgin and Outpost are just a few that I dropped. I never did make it off the waiting list for Screagle. But signing up in 2006 I also got me a lot of Carlise, Saxum, SQN, Cayuse, Scarecrow and other great wines.
I thought I was free from new mailing lists, until Russell Bevan pulled me back in with his new project, Adversity. Entirely by luck when a well-known local wine shop had to cancel a dinner due to a conflict, I organized a dinner for Russell and his wife last night at Bobby Van’s in NYC. We brought all sorts of Bevan Cellars wines and he poured his new project, adversity, which included a chardonnay - Meursault-like with better aromatics but higher acidity and not of the creamy type and a few red blends including one that was 45% cab franc, 45% merlot and 10% cabernet sauvignon (according to his wife, who corrected him after he described it incorrectly) and a few others that the fog in my brain make it impossible to remember. The 45/45/10 blend was a 2021 that was bottled in March 2023 and was amazingly approachable now!! Fruit, spice, a bit of floral on the nose and a great mouth feel.
The prices on the reds are not cheap, but that’s not his fault. The cost of grapes from the best plots in Napa is outrageously high and it is impossible to make money on high end red wine from Napa unless you sell it DTC (direct to consumer) because the three tier system takes (steals) too much of the revenue. BUT I will have to find a place for this in my cellar, and if you are younger than I am (72 years old going on 12), this is a list you should get on for the long term.
