Review: Wines of Heath Family Brands – Grape Creek and Invention, 2025 Releases
Texas’s Heath Family Brands is a high-end Texas wine operation, with wines sprawling across five different sub-brands. Today we’re looking at three of them, two under the Grape Creek brand and one under Invention Vineyards, all of which have been sold together as a three-pack. (We missed the boat on that one.) The good news is that you can still get all three of them individually, which we will attend to presently:
2022 Grape Creek Invention Red Wine Texas – Predominantly Petit Verdot, in a blend including Cabernet Sauvignon. Quite a surprising wine, heavy with currants and tart cherries, then pushing notes of cloves and ample dark chocolate. The tannins here are still youthful and biting, giving the midpalate a peppery quality, though the finish eventually retreats to notes of raisin and prune, ringed with allspice. Really surprising for Texas juice. A- / $61
2021 Grape Creek Mosaic Red Wine Texas – A classic Bordeaux-style blend, featuring the five iconic grapes. As dense and dark wine that, again, does not feel particularly Texan, undulating with flavors of cassis, dark chocolate, caramel sauce, and — with time — hints of rose petal, orange blossoms, and the lightest touch of caraway. I can’t imagine anyone tasting this wine and pegging it as anything other than a California blend, the wine lacking the distinctly dry leanness of many bottles produced here, instead heavily pushing its agenda of cocoa, raisin, and ephemeral florals. I assumed this would be a 15% abv monster, yet it’s bottled at a mere 13.2% abv. I’m impressed. A- / $59
2022 Invention Vineyards P2 – The two Ps are petite sirah and petit verdot, which blend here in a 46/54 ratio to create a monstrous experience, dense with cassis and anise, dark chocolate, and touches of prune. There’s clove in the mix here, which pairs well with the chocolate overtones, while baking spices cling to the back end. The wine is on the sweet side, though that helps it work well as an aperitif, perhaps less so with that ribeye, as the juicy, raisiny back-end may have you dreaming instead of dessert. All the same: A- / $58
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