An opportunity to sample (and stash) the final vintages from California’s best (? arguably) Rhone winemaker ever.

Includes 3 bottles each of

2018 Edmunds St John El Jaleo Shake Ridge - 31% Mourvedre, 29% Grenache, 26% Graciano and 14% Tempranillo

2020 Edmunds St John El Jaleo Shake Ridge - 35% Graciano, 25% Tempranillo, 22% Mourvedre, and 18% Grenache

Excerpted from an SF Chronicle article on his retirement:

California winemakers retire all the time, but wineries rarely do. More often the businesses are bought or bequeathed. But through the end, Edmunds St. John remained an uncommonly independent entity: It didn’t own any vineyards or a winemaking facility, and it was largely a one-man show, inextricable from Edmunds himself.

Edmunds never became mainstream-wine famous. He never produced much in the way of volume. He never charged much for his bottles; even today, they top out around $30-$35. His wines never became culty collectors’ items. You had to know about Edmunds St. John. And if you did, chances were you loved it.

A resident of Berkeley, Edmunds shares an aesthetic with the East Bay city’s most famous wine personality, Kermit Lynch, the importer of many legendary southern French wines. One of Lynch’s early discoveries, Provence’s Domaine Tempier, inspired Edmunds to start making wine. In 1985, he bought Mourvedre grapes from the Brandlin Vineyard in Napa Valley’s Mount Veeder, hoping to evoke something of Tempier’s earthy, rustic Mourvedre.

He succeeded. When Lynch showed the Edmunds St. John Mourvedre to Francois Peyraud, the owner of Domaine Tempier, Peyraud paid it the highest compliment: “La terre parle.” The earth speaks.

“I could not believe what he was doing with the Rhone varieties,” Lynch told the Chronicle in 2018. “I was introducing America to northern and southern Rhone wines, and Steve seemed to be able to make some of the best — right there in Berkeley, using California grapes!”