Revisiting the Devin Nunes winery

Anyone who writes about wine for a while finds himself coming back to old friends as the years go by. This wine here was actually fuller and more sumptuous in that vintage five years ago, while that wine over there really came into its own in the most recently released vintage.

Just as with people, some wines with early promise somehow go astray and never amount to much, while others that were disorganized and introverted when young suddenly blossom and turn outward as they age, the magic sunflowers of viticulture.

Most writers about wine will have similar stories. It’s a bit rarer for most of us, however, to get in on the ground floor and stand by while a new vineyard, fawn-like, is born, manages to stand up on its own and then goes trotting off. I have been privileged to do that with the Devin Nunes winery on California’s Central Coast, which brought its first vintage to the world just two years ago and is now on the threshold of introducing its third vintage, the 2023, to market.

Longtime readers will recall that I wrote about these wines a couple of years ago and peeked in briefly last year with an update. I have just been able to taste two 2023 wines pre-release and also went back to check on how the 2021 is coming along.

Nunes, a former congressman, teamed up with Mike Sinor, the founding winemaker at the storied Ancient Peaks Winery in Santa Margarita, to make two types of red. One is a cabernet called Patriot (there is also a Patriot Reserve), which is a solid, food-friendly cab that is forthright, well-structured and unapologetic. It’s a serious but unfussy wine that blooms and opens in the glass. You can get it direct from the winery for $50 ($120 for the reserve).

I like the Nunes cab. But the winery’s most distinctive wines are blends of Portuguese grapes – predominantly Touriga Nacional, Tinta Cão and Sezão – grown in the Paso Robles hills and the valleys beneath. These are some of the grapes used to make Port wine in Portugal, but the Nunes reds are nothing like Port. They are big, hot, fruity wines that seem a little shy at first but repay patience. I will wager you’ve never had anything quite like them. We opened the 2023 Hidden JEM (Cute! The initials represent the names of Nunes’s daughters) and the 2023 Reserve about four hours before tasting. We should have given them six or more. They were robust but taciturn at first but became more gregarious with the beef stew. We corked what we didn’t drink and found that they continued to blossom overnight and were even brighter and more complex the next day, with no perceptible loss of finesse or finish.

Does that mean that these wines will age well? It is too early to say. Check back with me in ten years. An encouraging sign is that the 2021 Central Coast (the precursor to Hidden JEM, which has a more complex cépage) is maturing nicely. I wrote about it two years ago, liked it, and was pleased to see that it had gained in complexity.

Nunes has been gradually increasing production, but the quantities of all his wines remain small: fewer than 500 cases. As I noted in a previous column, this is one reason that you will not be able to stroll down to your local wine emporium and pick up a bottle. Your best bet is look up the winery online and take a peek at its website. There, you can order the wines or, even better, become a member of the Devin Nunes wine club, which will guarantee you both a discount and a case or more of his delicious bottles every year.

I turn now to the public service I began last month with my introduction of Maranges and Saint-Romain, two small regions in Burgundy where the wines are delicious yet (for Burgundy) affordable.

Today, let me tell you about Ladoix, on the northern edge of the Côtes de Beaune, and Bachelet-Monnot, a wine that comes from vineyards within the Puligny and Chassagne communes, but which sells for a fraction of its close cousins with the fancier names. You will find both pinot noir and chardonnay in Ladoix. We had the 2023 Les Marnes Blanches from Domaine Faiveley, an elegant, aromatic chardonnay full (as the winery notes) of “subtle brioche and citrus flavors.” It can be yours for about $45.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.