Classic California Merlot: Tasting Four Decades of Duckhorn Three Palms Vineyard

Long before Duckhorn Vineyards grew into a $1 billion company producing a half-dozen brands, it was a small family-owned outfit known for making California merlot.

The key Duckhorn wine that captured the attention of the wine trade and serious wine drinkers in the early 1980s was a vineyard-designated merlot made from the Three Palms property beginning in 1978. The 83-acre vineyard sits near the town of Calistoga in the northwest corner of Napa Valley. 

Fast forward almost half a century and Duckhorn still makes that wine. It is structured, complex, rather tannic and full-bodied, especially for a merlot, which is generally known for its soft and silky texture. Fans of California wine thought from the beginning that the Three Palms merlot had the concentration and balance to age well. But has it aged well?

A recent vertical tasting of Three Palms hosted by Duckhorn winemaker Renee Ary as part of a 50^th anniversary celebration for the St. Helena winery proved that it has. Out of five wines spanning four decades, four were remarkably alive, fresh and delicious. Only the oldest, a lean and earthy 1986, was less than outstanding in quality – possibly because it was from a bottle in less-than-perfect condition.

It was tough to choose a favorite among the other five, but for me it was the Duckhorn Vineyards Merlot Napa Valley Three Palms Vineyard 1999. This wine, from a cool, moderate growing season that didn’t produce the overt ripeness that was in fashion at the time, offers a deep well of fruit flavor, wonderful savory accents, moderate tannins and buoyant acidity.

Two of the wines, 2007 and 2011, came from hugely different vintage conditions. Warmth, ripeness and full body in the 2007 reflected a hot year with maximum sugar development in the grapes, while the 2011 was the opposite. That ill-starred vintage was rainy in spring and early summer, cool and humid in general and plagued by botrytis and mildew at harvest time.

The 2011 tasted smooth, light-bodied, balanced and fresh. Both wines earned mid-90s scores but for different reasons. The newest wine in the vertical, 2014, was Ary’s first vintage in charge, after 11 years working for Duckhorn. It tasted almost sweet in red fruits blanketed by velvety tannins.

Ary talked about the terroir of Three Palms Vineyard and how it enables a moderate-climate grape variety to excel in a generally hot part of Napa Valley. “The wine’s character is attributable to that wonderful rocky soil out there,” she said. “We get tiny berries that give great structure and that earthy complexity.”

She compared the tannin structure that comes from this valley floor site to that of a Howell Mountain cabernet sauvignon grown at 1,500 feet elevation. “Those rocks and that soil subsurface give an earthy, wet slate flavor,” she said. “I like to think it has an old-world note.”

That might be partly because the merlot in almost all vintages is blended with other grapes as in Bordeaux, from about 8 percent to 13 percent of a mix of cabernet sauvignon, cabernet franc and/or others.

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Three Palms Vineyard was established by brothers John and Sloan Upton but came under Duckhorn control in 2011 and Duckhorn ownership in 2015. As you might guess, three palm trees, skinny and 60-feet tall, make the site’s location easily visible from the Silverado Trail roadway.

Ary said the oldest vines going into Three Palms merlot today were planted in 1973 by the Uptons, with the majority having been planted in the 1990s. A minority of the merlot comes from vines replanted in 2021.

Most are spaced at 8 by 10 feet and 6 by 10 feet, spread out on bilateral cordons for a modified California sprawl configuration and irrigated. The merlot vines are clone 181 and Bear Flat, a selection Ary said is believed to have come from nearby Sterling Vineyard. 

The tasting for media and trade members also included a horizontal sampling of five other Duckhorn single-vineyard, estate-grown reds from Ary’s debut vintage as head winemaker. These 2014s included two merlots, a Three Palms cabernet sauvignon and my top scorer: the Duckhorn Vineyards Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon Patzimaro Vineyard 2014.

Check out the tasting notes and scores below so you can be on the lookout for some of these California classics.

– Jim Gordon, Editor-at-Large

The list of wines below is comprised of bottles tasted and rated by the JamesSuckling.com tasting team. You can sort the wines below by vintage and score. You can also search for specific wines in the search bar.