August 18, 2009 (RALEIGH, NC) – Tobacco Road Cellars, a boutique Napa Valley winery owned by Jason Earnest and Dusty Field of Raleigh, North Carolina, will introduce four new Cabernets during a stylish red-carpet celebration and silent auction to be held Thursday, October 8, from 6 to 9 p.m. at the RBC Plaza pool deck high above downtown Raleigh.
The event is entitled “Bacchanalle: A Cultural Intervention.” According to Tobacco Road Cellars co-owners Jason Earnest and Dusty Field, the evening will include tastings of the new wines, catered dining that will pair the wines with haut cuisine, music, VIP suites for the winery’s Regency Club members, and lavish decorations.
The evening’s silent auction will offers such items as an original handpainted surfboard by Raleigh artist Clark Hipolito of ArtCo Surf that will be signed by the Carolina Hurricanes, other signed items by such sports luminaries as the Hurricanes goalie Cam Ward, Duke University basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski and various wine packages from Tobacco Road Cellars. A portion of the proceeds will be donated to the Frankie Lemmon Center School & Development Center in Raleigh.
Clark Hipolito has also created an original work of art for one of the Cabernets’ labels and will be unveiling his new series “Cultural Intervention” during the event.
Earnest calls Bacchanalle as “an alchemist experience blending visual art, high design, fine wine and extraordinary personalities.”
The Cabernets Tobacco Road Cellars will introduced during the Bacchanalle event are “Vitality,” “Tradition,” “07 V” (honoring former NCSU basketball coach Jim Valvano with a portion of the proceeds supporting the Jimmy V Foundation), and the Private Reserve.
Earnest describes “Vitality” as a “deep, mid-red with violet hues with great blue fruit and black berry aromas, lifted raspberry and black cherry with dark, brooding notes of fig, coffee and spice. It’s an excellent mid-weight palate entry with dense fruit weight supported by heaps of fine-grained oak and fruit tannin. The wine has fruit-forward style that’s very well backed up by layers of deep, softly drying tannin.”
“Tradition” offers “sweet, ripe, black berry with a warm alcohol lift of spice and nutmeg,” he said. “It has rich, mouth-filling black fruit flavors with solid, blocky tannins. Very firm finish, drying but sweet at the same time. The Palate lingers and shows lots of classy French oak palate weight. Firmer acid helps lift the tannic finish, which will soften nicely over the next three to five years.”
Of the Private Reserve, Earnest notes, “This is a very solid, deep, dark red/black wine with purple hues. It offers aromatics of black fruit, chocolate, mocha and berries that draw you into the wine. It has a lovely solid entry with gobs of firm tannin. Its rich fruit weight is a class above other wines and supported by an amalgam of French oak flavors of vanilla, toasty oak and spice. It has a huge palate that just keeps going and going. Big blocky tannins appear a little proud at present, but given time it will soften into a true classic Napa Cabernet for those patient enough to wait.”
And the ’07 V is “supple, fleshy and very defined as berry fruits lead into a classy, sexy, fine-grained tannin finish that lingers on and on,” he said. “The French oak is evident but not obtrusive — quite elegant and fine boned but overall very classy and seductive. It’s delicious!”
Tickets for the Bacchnalle event are $100 and only 250 will be sold. An after-party will also be held at Solas restaurant and lounge on Glenwood South for ticketed guests only. To order tickets go to www.bacchanalle.com or call 888.770.3635.
For more information on Tobacco Road Cellars, visit www.tobaccoroadcellars.com.
About Tobacco Road Cellars
Award-winning Tobacco Road Cellars was conceived when two North Carolina-based entrepreneurs and wine enthusiasts, Jason Earnest and Dusty Field, went to Napa Valley to create a wine to give as holiday gifts. The results were so successful that they decided to create their own boutique winery committed to producing world-class wines from California grapes. The partners now have several years of bottlings and have been endorsed by Gary Vaynerchuk of winelibrary.com, who called Tobacco Road Cellars’ 2005 Private Reserve “stupid good.” The winery’s 2005 Cabernet Sauvignon received the 2008 Gold Medal in the International Wine Competition held in Riverside, California. For more information visit http://www.tobaccoroadcellars.com.
The origin of the word Bacchanalle
Bacchanalle – pronounced bak-uh-ney-lee-uh – was coined by the Tobacco Road Cellars owners and Raleigh interior designer Clark Hipolito. It incorporates the root word bacchanalia that, in Greco-Roman religion, refers to any of the several festivals of Bacchus, or Dionysus, the wine god. And it mixes with the word, “Biennale”, which is Italian for “every other year” and can be used to describe any event that happens every two years. It is commonly used within the art world to describe an international manifestation of contemporary art — for example, the Biennale de Paris, which was created in 1959 by André Malraux. The term is most commonly used in the context of major repeating art exhibitions. According to Jason Earnest of Tobacco Road Cellars, it also refers to Hipolito’s visual style for his design projects: “faux paint effects, banquet-hall tapestries and lighting, large furnishings, etc.”
Client News and Media Recognition 