07/18/2026
Elders and young vines, same mountain, finding their footing together.
The expansion of our Diamond Mountain estate vineyards started in 2014 — one acre of Merlot, two acres of Jenkins clone Cabernet, tucked between the forests where the redwoods and pines meet and the hawks perch above. Jenkins is a rare heritage cutting descended from Château Lafite Rothschild, and on this site it became the singular clone behind Hawk's Prey, our purest expression of what this secluded pocket of the mountain can do with one grape, one block, no blending.
2017 brought Clone 685, a certified French selection of Cabernet Sauvignon from near the Pyrenees. We wanted blueberry fruit, bright minerality, and vibrant acidity — the aromatic lift and finer tannin structure of Bordeaux and Southern France, not the dense, fruit-forward power Napa Cabernet is known for. Those blocks became the foundation of Theorem Decree, our most aromatic, silky, approachable Diamond Mountain Cabernet.
2019 asked a different question. On the slope beside our 1985 heritage Clone 8 — the single-vineyard source for our flagship Voir Dire — we planted two acres of Clone 30, a heritage selection traced back to Harry See and the earliest days of Stags Leap District. Elsewhere on the estate, Clone 7, the Concannon clone by way of Bordeaux cuttings, got two acres to prove itself as a workhorse on the mountain.
Then in 2020, we planted our first new Clone 8 vines — less than an acre, right alongside the 1985 vineyard block that started it all. Same clone, same hillside, different age. We wanted to see what the elders could teach the kids, and what the kids might show us that the elders can't anymore.
Six years. Twelve years. Forty-one years. Every block still finding its footing, still learning what this mountain desires from it. That's the truth about Diamond Mountain — it doesn't arrive quickly, and it doesn't arrive alone.
