Estate Red
⏳ wine.drinking_window
Typically best enjoyed 5 to 15 years from the vintage release, allowing the robust tannins to soften and complex tertiary notes to emerge.
🍽️ wine.food_pairings
grilled ribeye steak, roasted lamb chops, braised beef short ribs
✨ wine.spec_sheet
The Fidelitas Estate Red is a profound expression of the winery's home turf on Red Mountain, Washington State's smallest and most distinctive appellation. Planted in 2009, the Estate Vineyard sits on a gentle, southwest-facing slope that basks in intense desert sunlight, tempered by the persistent, cooling winds sweeping through the Columbia Gap. This extreme terroir, characterized by low-nutrient gravelly soils and scarce rainfall, forces the vines to struggle, producing exceptionally small berries with thick skins. The resulting wine is a masterful Bordeaux-style blend that captures the raw power and structured elegance of Red Mountain. Crafted by winemaker Charlie Hoppes, the Estate Red undergoes meticulous fermentation and aging in predominantly French oak barrels, creating a wine of remarkable depth, dark fruit concentration, and a signature mineral-driven finish that reflects the ancient volcanic basalt underlying the vineyard.
🍾 wine.about_producer
Established in 2000 by acclaimed winemaker Charlie Hoppes, Fidelitas is a premier boutique winery deeply rooted in the Red Mountain AVA of Washington State. With a steadfast focus on crafting exceptional Bordeaux-style blends and single-vineyard Cabernet Sauvignons, the winery sources grapes from some of the region's most prestigious vineyards, including Champoux, Ciel du Cheval, and Quintessence, alongside their own estate plantings. Fidelitas is renowned for its modern, precise winemaking techniques, utilizing carefully selected French and American oak barrels to shape wines of remarkable concentration, structure, and aging potential. Under Hoppes' expert guidance, the estate has become a benchmark producer for Red Mountain, capturing the unique, sun-drenched terroir in every bottle of their signature Optu Red and site-specific Cabernet Sauvignon expressions.