Hardy Wallace took a circuitous path to winemaking, and yet the role, for him, seemed inevitable. Wallace walked away from a tech career in Atlanta after securing a marketing fellowship from Murphy-Goode Cellars, then as now part of Jackson Family Wines. He was given a one-year residency as the brand’s social media manager (it was called A Really Goode Job) chronicling the goings-on at the Sonoma winery, which had him delving into winemaking whole hog.
With partner Matt Richardson, Wallace started Dirty & Rowdy in 2010 (he was “Dirty”, as in “Dirty South”), a wine brand focusing on mourvedre, semillon, chenin blanc and petite sirah, playful wines with a decidedly natural bent. After 11 years he parted ways with Richardson and unveiled a new brand concept in 2021, the Extradimensional Wine Co. Yeah; by the name alone you get the sense that Dirty & Rowdy could no longer contain Wallace’s penchant for the outer limits.
With his wife, Kate Graham, Wallace makes and markets several natural-leaning wines at Extradimensional—muscats, chenin blancs, grenache, orange wines, blends—with minimal handling, miniscule sulfur additions, all delivered by way of a mildly psychedelic, millennial identity system—wines, he informs us, that are “free from shoulds and should nots.” And yet here’s one you should seek out, Extradimensional’s Marvelous Mourvèdre. Unfined and unfiltered, blended with a little grenache and carignane, it’s drawn mostly from Del Barba vineyard in the Contra Costa Delta sands, one of Wallace’s old-vine sources from his Dirty & Rowdy days. This wine is light, juicy, youthful, but no less willful because of it: fermented whole-cluster, with partial carbonic maceration, it’s exotically savory with scents of spiced berries, licorice and burst cherries. The flavors are generous, fruit driven, focused but with a carbonic friskiness, currently delicious, with the stuffing to age.
93
Extradimensional Wine Co. Yeah 2022 Contra Costa County Marvelous Mourvèdre
$55
Every week, our editors highlight a wine that intrigued them in our blind panel tastings, expanding on their tasting note in this space. These are entirely editorial choices; there are no paid placements. Subscribers can also access the original tasting note by searching here.
Patrick J. Comiskey covers US wines for Wine & Spirits magazine, focusing on the Pacific Northwest, California’s Central Coast and New York’s Finger Lakes.
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