Guarachi

Here's a new one that has been doing well in recent weeks: Guarachi Family Wines 2007Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon. This is the inaugural vintage for Guarachi and boasts 100% Cabernet from Napa. The juice comes from three distinct vineyards with the lion's share coming from a vineyard in Rutherford formerly owned by Beaulieu and planted by the legendary Georges de Latour in 1928. The wine is an opaque purple in color with focused cherry and blackberry fruits sheathed in long supple tannins. Malolactic fermentation occurs in french oak barrels before eighteen months of aging with the expectation this dense and powerful wine will improve for ten years. The wine is made by Paul Hobbs and comes in a six pack case and retails for $65/btl but you don't have to buy six to get the discount if you cite this article.

Alex Guarachi is a 1970's immigrant from Chile, the oldest "new world" wine producing country going back to the 16th century and Spanish colonization. He calls Los Angeles home and has imported Chilean wines since the 70's, not an easy thing to do in California. His business partner is George Tralle, a manufacturer of microchips in Silicon Valley.

Coming from a wine culture like Chile, Guarachi recognized just how unique Napa Valley was. It is one eighth the size of Bordeaux and contains one half of the known soils in the world. The soils he chose for this wine are well-drained with a composition of gravel, loam, and sand rich in volcanic deposits and marine sediments.

Guarachi is also a humanitarian. After the Chilean earthquake in 2010, he donated $50,000. to Habitat for Humanity International, the largest donation of its kind to date for this disaster. He further designates a percentage of his profits in wine sales to this effort. It is well known that this disaster devastated the wine industry in Chile, so Guarachi's charity is understandable, however, he avers that it is always the poor in such situations who are left homeless.