Quickly becoming one of my favorite tastings of the year.
Apparently the Fisher holdings in Napa are twofold, and lie at great distance from one another.
Down in the valley, they have their more famous vineyards - the Lamb vineyard [by the way, there's no relationship whatsoever between Fisher's "Lamb" vineyard, named after Rob's Mom's Dad, and Herb Lamb's "Herb Lamb" vineyard, whose fruit is sold to Colgin], and also the various vineyards that produce the Coach Insignia & Cameron blends [Cameron being one of Rob's sisters].
Then up way up on Spring Mountain, about twenty minutes as the car drives, out in the middle of nowhere [their only neighbors being the Prides, a few miles down the road], the Fishers have three more vineyards - the Wedding vineyard [where Rob's parents were married], planted in Cabernet, and the Whitney & Mountain vineyards, both planted in Chardonnay [Whitney is Rob's other sister]. Oh, and there's also a super-secret mountain syrah, offered only to their oldest and best customers, which Rob claims is very Northern Rhone-ish in style. [I'd love to try that one some day.]
The valley wines are very nice - they're certainly well known to the professional point-givers, and I'd note that the Coach Insignia, which shows a heavy extraction when first opened, comes around very nicely with about an hour's worth of air time - but the Fisher style just shines at high altitude.
2000 has been largely written-off as one of the worst Napa vintages in recent memory, but after a couple of weeks of tasting through many of the recent releases of some of the most famous Cabs from Napa [and from much "better" vintages, no less], I'd have to say that the 2000 Wedding Cab was the class of the lot - really elegant juice that's just singing right now.
Shame we didn't get a chance to taste the 2001.
But the real star of this tasting - the gem of the Fisher holdings - was, once again, the Mountain Vineyard chardonnay. Now I loved the 2003 Mountain [I believe it ended up with 94 points from both Laube & Monkton], but the 2004 exists on a whole new plain of minerality and complexity.
My first thought was that the 2004 Fisher Mountain was the kind of wine that Toni Bodenstein would make if he lived in Napa [it's got that weird, high-altitude, chalky/funky thing going on, like Bodenstein's Weissenkirchen juice], but after a few days of reflection, I was thinking that the Fisher Mountain also had some of those secondary & tertiary notes that you can get in a young Honivogl.
Then, completely out of the blue, I found myself at a local restaurant the other night, and we ordered a bottle of the 2001 Honivogl [a whale of a wine in its own right, with an almost overpowering nose], but I couldn't help concluding that the 2004 Fisher Mountain is an even more complex wine, that just flat-out tastes better. [At least at this early point in the game; whether the Mountain style will age, I know not - there seems to be some evidence that the Whitney's will age, but that's a much larger, heavier, brawnier & more voluptuous wine, so I guess the jury's still out on the Mountain.]
Now I can't afford Le Montrachet, or Ygrec, or even Kistler [for that matter] - so take this for what it's worth - but Fisher Mountain is quietly elbowing its way onto my short list of the very best terroirs in the entire world.