2019 Gramercy Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon Lower East Columbia Valley 750 ml

In Washington State, certain winery names carry genuine weight. Gramercy Cellars is one of them. Master Sommelier Greg Harrington and co-winemaker Brandon Moss built one of the region’s most admired programs on a clear philosophy: the best vineyard partners, fruit harvested before it overripens, and winemaking kept as minimal as the wine allows. The Lower East Cabernet Sauvignon is where that thinking meets an accessible price.

The name nods simultaneously to geography and biography. Walla Walla sits in the lower, eastern corner of Washington—Lower East on the map. But it also references the Manhattan neighborhood Greg and Pam Harrington left when they traded restaurant careers for a winery. Harrington passed the Master Sommelier exam at 26—the youngest American to do so—after years running programs for Wolfgang Puck and Emeril Lagasse. Washington gave him what he’d struggled to find elsewhere: wines with genuine restraint and a real sense of place.

The fruit comes from the same premium sites as Gramercy’s reserve Cabernets—Phinny Hill in the Horse Heaven Hills, Pepperbridge in the Walla Walla Valley, and the Gramercy Estate—assembled to deliver the character of those addresses at a more accessible price.

Phinny Hill anchors the blend at roughly 50%. Harrington worked with the Beightol family to plant Cabernet specifically for Gramercy on a gravel outcropping in the Horse Heaven Hills, and the site returned what a Bordeaux-trained palate would want: red fruit, stony mineral character, bright acidity, and firm, focused tannin.

Pepperbridge, planted in 1991 on the terraced remnants of ice-age flood deposits at 850 feet in the Walla Walla Valley, contributes darker fruit and structural depth. The Gramercy Estate fills the mid-palate with the blue and black fruit characteristic of Walla Walla Cab.

The 2019 vintage suited this approach well. After a run of warm years in the Columbia Valley, 2019 ran cooler—lower heat accumulation, higher natural acidity, a longer season that developed fruit without pushing alcohol. Harrington has called it a paradise vintage for the Gramercy style.