Thank you to all who took advantage of our March Madness event! We've sold out of our 2005 Chaos Theory, and soon our 2006 Arrested zin will be no more.

The Arrested myth is worth recounting for those unfamiliar with the history of this unique "double estate" dessert wine.

Nearly ten years ago, winemaker Dave Brown produced his first late harvest zin from the 2001 vintage. Knowing it wouldn't appear regularly in the BE lineup – the growing season rarely supports the late harvest proposition, which requires a special set of conditions to yield just the right juice – we adorned it with our first ever black label. Such a well-structured dessert wine was this that many of our customers took to buying and consuming it like a regular zin.



The BE black label has reappeared only once since then, on our 2004 Late Harvest zin (our first ever half-bottle package, pictured here).

Meanwhile, Dave was barrel aging 450 gallons of BE zinfandel brandy that had been distilled for us by his good friend Marko Karakasevic of Charbay fame. The 2005 growing season was not conducive to late harvest zin production, but consumer demand was high for another dessert style BE wine. And so our Arrested zinfandel – to our knowledge the first ever "double-estate" fortified dessert wine (a.k.a. Port, if we could legally call it that) – was born.

The 2006, our second vintage of Arrested zin, is now nearing sold out status. This is the last zinfandel dessert wine BE will produce for a spell. Get it while you can, and stay tuned!