We were coming to the end of a wonderful and charming wine tasting at The Fine Wine Source in Livonia, Michigan featuring the wines of Ashes & Diamonds Winery and being entertained by the proprietor Kashy Khaledi.  It is always a pleasure to do a winetasting with an owner or a winemaker, as it makes it much more personable and intriguing.

Kashy Khaledi is a creative executive in multimedia and advertising, noted for his achievements bridging culture and branding for clients such as Intel, Google, Microsoft, Mazda, and many others.  He has been nominated and won awards in his industry.  He has also turned towards another industry, as he launched Ashes & Diamonds Winery in 2017, and has already been recognized within the trade.  A California native, who with his wife and daughter enjoy such amenities of the state, like revival movies.  If his name sounds familiar, his father is Darioush Khaledi, who has Darioush Winery in Napa Valley, and while he could have followed in his father’s business, he started out in one business endeavor and then another.  Even the winery has his own take, as it is reminiscent of architecture that one could call California Modern from the 1950s and 1960’s. 

The final bottle of the tasting was Ashes & Diamonds Winery V. 1 Napa Valley 2019. This is their flagship wine and was a joint effort by winemakers Steve Matthiasson, Diana Snowden Seysses, and Dan Petroski.  The wine is a blend of forty-eight percent Merlot, forty-one percent Cabernet Sauvignon, and eleven percent Cabernet Franc.  The fruit has been sourced from select vineyards in Atlas Peak, Mount Veeder, and Ashes & Diamonds Estate Vineyard in Oak Knoll.  The vineyards are farmed organically and biodynamically emphasizing sustainable practices.  The fruit undergoes Maceration and Initial Fermentation in Stainless Steel for fifteen days with indigenous yeast.  The wine is then aged for nineteen months in French Oak, of which thirty percent is new.  There were four-hundred-twenty-two-cases produced.  The wine was a deep ruby red color and offered notes of red and black fruits, cedar, and that ethereal sous-bois, the French wine terms evoking autumn woods, white truffles, mushrooms, and organic soil.  On the palate there were rich tones of black cherry, plum, cassis, with secondary tones of oak, cedar, dried tobacco blending with silky tannins and finishing with a nice long finish of fruit and terroir.  A great wine for cellaring.

It was an interesting tasting as the wine was merged with Kashy Khaledi’s other businesses and interests as well.  The labels were created by graphic designer Brian Roettinger, who basically works on music album covers, and this is his first winery work.  The label with missing characters replaced with asterisks is used for the blends, outside of Vol. 1, which has it’s own look; while the block label of black and white indicates single vineyard wines.  The name Ashes and Diamonds pays homage to the Polish film of 1958, and the novel of 1948 by Jerzy Andrzejewski.  The original name comes from a 19^th Century poem by Polish poet and artist Cyprian Norwid. As you will notice, we bought a case of wine after the tasting, but there are only eleven bottles there.  The last of the V. 1 will be delivered to The Fine Wine Source in about a month, as there was one case allotted to a firm in the Hamptons, and the balance will be sent to Livonia.