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Located in the Stones of the Walla Walla Valley, Horsepower Vineyards is about tradition and history—and making history. It’s a connection between a vigneron and his roots. A homage to craft and family. An embrace of the earth that seems at once old-fashioned and new. And at its simplest, it’s a man slowly working the vineyard with his horse, just like generations before him. Tradition isn’t an abstract concept to Christophe Baron, founder of Cayuse Vineyards and Horsepower Vineyards—he was born into it. The oldest son of the centuries-old Champagne house, Baron Albert, his family has worked their land in the Marne Valley of France since 1677 as recently as 1957, horses still did all of the vineyard cultivation. Horsepower represents a return to that time, to a simplicity of craftsmanship and purpose primarily lost in the modern translation. It’s a window to the Old World in the new.
Christophe Baron was not only the first vigneron to plant successful vineyards in the Stones of the Walla Walla Valley and use biodynamic farming methods but also the first to use horses for cultivation. Zeppo arrived in 2008, and Red followed a year later. Today, the horses and their teamsters cultivate tightly spaced, 19th-century-style vineyards that only they can navigate, using specialized farming equipment created by a blacksmith in Burgundy, France.
That’s why, on any given day in any of our three vineyards, the only sound you’re likely to hear is the hoofbeat of tradition, played and preserved on the stones of Horsepower.
This 3-acre Syrah vineyard is planted one vine per stake. Spacing is 3.5 feet by 3.5 feet, totaling 3,555 vines per acre.
The 2020 Syrah, The Tribe Vineyard, lifts from the glass with a savory bouquet, mixing crushed peppercorns with grilled herbs, wet stones, and currants. It’s profoundly textural and massive upon entry, with a core of vibrant acidity to balance, along with tart wild berry fruits and zesty acidity that offsets its power and intensity. The 2020 finishes fresh yet grippy, with inner violet and olive tones, as silty tannins add a pinch of cheek-puckering tension. The 2020 The Tribe mixes vibrancy and power in a way that I find wildly attractive. —Eric Guido, Vinous