2016 Frequency GSM Santa Barbara County 750 ml

Santa Barbara Rising Star’s GSM Red

The 2016 Frequency GSM contains some of Santa Barbara County’s finest Rhône-style DNA: For the last nine years, winemaker Zac Wasserman has been working alongside one of the area’s most celebrated winemakers, Joey Tensley, making what Robert Parker’s Wine Advocate called “high-end, super-duper” Rhône-style wines. Now, Wasserman has hit the mark with his juicy and spiced, ripe and well-rounded Côtes-du-Rhône-style blend. The critics have noticed. Antonio Galloni of Vinous called the 2016 GSM “supple, open-knit and impeccably balanced.” Jeb Dunnuck was succinct, dubbing it a “total crowd-pleaser.” Hailing from a vintage of exquisite quality and several of the same vineyards as Wasserman’s single-source wines—including Tensley’s renowned Colson Canyon site—this wine boasts juicy cherry and plum, plenty of spice, and soft, velvety tannins. This wine will always remind me of the first time I enjoyed it during an impromptu gathering at my house in Napa. Over glasses with longtime friends, it immediately became the centerpiece, proved an excellent complement to the evening’s grilled skirt steak and great conversations. We only wished we had more. Here’s your chance: $22.99 per bottle, shipping included on 6.

What is in the bottle, and what impressed Wine Advocate, Vinous, and Jeb Dunnuck, is a soft-edged rollercoaster of fruit and spice that packs tons of pleasure in a $22.99 bottle. Little wonder when you consider the story of Zac Wasserman.

Wasserman is one of an increasingly rare breed: He is not a winemaker who was seduced by the Golden West and dropped everything to pursue a winemaking dream. He’s a Santa Barbara wine country native who, after graduating high school in 2005, bolted his hometown to study at Berkeley. But after five years of living in the Bay Area, he had a conversation with his sister that made him question the long hours of “grunt work” he was putting in at a lab that turned algae into biofuel. Meanwhile, his sister was performing a much more pleasurable alchemy, working for Joey Tensley, and even making her own barrel of wine. So in 2010, Zac returned home to work with Tensley. In 2011, he started Frequency.

Zac quickly rose to become Tensley’s assistant winemaker, and over the last nine years, as Joey Tensley’s wines have flirted with perfection, Wasserman’s have earned more and more critical notice. The similarities are there—Wine Advocate paid the young winemaker a great compliment by noting that the Frequency wines share a stylistic philosophy with those of Rhône-master Tensley—but Frequency is undoubtedly a case of the mentee making good out on his own.

Zac scored some grapes from Tensley’s Colson Canyon vineyard, and also sources from diverse locations around the County. He took Syrah from the Watch Hill Vineyard—from which he also makes a single-source wine—and Grenache, Syrah, and Mourvèdre from Verna’s Vineyard at Santa Barbara’s revered Melville estate. Unlike most Rhône-style winemakers in the area, Wasserman ferments all the varieties in his blend together, allowing grapes of varying ripeness to balance one another out. After fermentation, the edges are softened out by nine months in neutral French oak.