We found that Mondays often are some of the best days for the winery visits. There are fewer visitors, and it's an excellent opportunity to learn more about the winery and its wine from the staff. It's especially true if they are really passionate about wine and the winery they work for and like to learn about wine in general and their own wine region.
It was our lucky Monday when we visited Nefarious Cellars winery in the Lake Chelan region of Washington state. We were helped by Eric, who does wholesale for Nefarious and rarely works in the tasting room. Eric was a wealth of knowledge, and we learned a lot about the winery and Lake Chelan region from him.
We learned that Nefarious winemaking team is quite unique. Dean and Heather Neff are owners and winemakers, hence the name of the winery - NEFarious. Dean is responsible for the red winemaking and Heather for the white one.
On our trip to Lake Chelan Nefarious was one of a few wineries where we were impressed by the entire flight. It's not that other wineries had lousy wine, it's just inconsistent quality of different varieties. At Nefarious, it was hard to pick a favorite because the overall quality was high. We guess a little internal competition helps.
We had to pick one for the review, and it was 2016 Malbec from the fruit of Defiance Vineyard in Lake Chelan.
Tasting Notes
The Nefarious Malbec has a medium ruby color, and it's a bit lighter than a typical wine for this varietal. Turned out that it didn't really matter because the wine was delicious.
The aromas were what we would expect from Malbec and more. We sensed sour cherry, Morello cherry and savory notes of sundried tomatoes and earth.
On the palate, it's brambly with flavors of ripe cherry, blackberry, licorice, toast, and smoke.
Overall we were very impressed by Nefarious Malbec, and it showed the potential of the young Lake Chelan wine region.
Heather, for the purposes of this review, we only picked one wine from each winery we visited. Promise we will come back to taste and write the review on Nefarious white next time, and we are looking forward to it.