Winemaking
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When asked what style of wine we make, the response is always ‘great wines’. After we’ve all laughed, the real answer emerges. After almost 30 years of winemaking, we still firmly believe in a minimalist approach—allowing the wine to express itself and reflect the growing season through the nuances that appear from vintage to vintage. For this to happen and to produce those ‘great wines’, it is vital to pay attention to every detail. Carefully attending to every step of the winemaking process, yet always with a light hand. We don’t over-extract or over-oak our wines. We give the wines the fermentation and aging environments that allow them to become exceptional—so we can smell and taste what the fruit has to offer us.
Consistency is another element to our style. We cold-soak all the grapes for two to four days before fermenting, use the same cultured yeast and same type of François Frères barrels for 11-12 months of oak aging for our Pinot Noirs and 12-17 months for our Zinfandels. What varies from year to year is how the growing season affects the flavor profile of the grapes. Our goal is to let the grapes speak through the finished wine. Those vintage differences are a piece of the charm in both winemaking and wine drinking.
Peace,
Ben Papapietro
Winemaker
Single-Vineyard Designate Wines
What is Single-Vineyard Designate wine?
One of the exciting aspects of winemaking is tasting and smelling how a wine evolves after fermentation. Each wine develops its individual characteristics—expressing the vineyard’s terroir through aromas and flavors distinctive to that wine. It is this individuality that makes single-vineyard wines uniquely special.
With a blend, you can enhance the complexity, or develop a particular component or flavor of a wine, by adding in different percentages from various vineyards. A winemaker might even add up to 25% of one or more other varietals for those same reasons. Although we do blend vineyards together in our appellation and clonal wines, all our Pinot Noirs are 100% Pinot and the same is true for our Zinfandels.
With single-vineyard wines, they are what they are—each an individual, just like a person—all uniquely different. To qualify for a single-vineyard designation, at least 95% of the wine must come from the vineyard listed on the label. Making the wine truly an expression of that vineyard—a sense of place.
Through their aromas and flavors wines share their unique expression of place, what the French call terroir. What changes from year to year in a single-vineyard wine is the growing season. We believe the fruit should always speak for itself, expressing its terroir and how that year affected the grapes, and in turn, the wine from that vintage.
When you taste single-vineyard wines, you can really appreciate what is unique in that wine and why it is different from another wine of the same varietal from a different vineyard. You can taste how a wine made from adjacent vineyards can vary, or how wine produced from a vineyard down the road is very different from one only a mile away in the other direction. The smell, the taste, the very essence of the wine changes from vineyard to vineyard.
This is what makes winemaking so exciting—those nuances, those subtle differences that our nose and palate can detect. So the next time someone offers you a single-vineyard designate wine, remember this wine is as unique as you are. Think of it as getting to know a new friend, and enjoy the experience. |
Clonal-Designate Pinot Noirs
What is a Clonal-Designate wine?
Pinot Noir vineyards are usually planted in blocks by clone type. When we receive the fruit, we keep each block or clone type separate in the cellar. During harvest, the floor of the cellar is a sea of small bins of fermenting must. Daily punch downs mean adding more hands for this time-consuming activity. We minimally punch down three times a day, and often more, allowing the gentle movement of punching down the cap into the juice to control the temperature during fermentation. The fermenting juice doesn’t sleep during harvest, and sometimes it feels like we don’t either, as we frequently monitor the temperature of the must.
Once the wines finish fermentation and are gently pressed into French oak barrels, we continue to keep each lot separate by vineyard and clone types. During the barrel aging we taste frequently—barrel by barrel—to see which of the wines best show the distinctive characteristics that represent the vineyard, the clone or the appellation where it was grown. Through this tasting process, we then decide which barrels to use in the single-vineyard designates, the clonal designates or the appellation blends, as in the Russian River Valley Pinot Noir.
Keeping all the Pinot Noirs separate by vineyard and clone type from the minute the grapes arrive, through fermentation and then barrel aging, takes more hands-on labor, additional record keeping and plenty of patience, but the results make all the extra attention to detail worthwhile. We are able to select just the right barrels to produce each of our wines.
For several years we toyed with the idea of doing a clonal-designate Pinot Noir. Tasting the various lots year after year, we were amazed by the depth of flavors and complexity of the clones and how they varied from vineyard to vineyard. Finally in 2003, we produced our first Pommard Clone Pinot Noir, then added the 777 Clone Pinot Noir in 2006.
Our Pommard Clone Pinot Noir is currently a blend from only two vineyards—Leras Family and Peters. In time this could change, but for now these two vineyards offer the ideal balance of flavors and complexity to showcase the beauty of this pinot noir clone.
Our 777 Clone Pinot Noir is a blend from four vineyards in the Russian River Valley—Peters, Leras Family, Windsor Oaks and Saralee’s Vineyards. Each of these vineyards represents a different microclimate and soil type within the Russian River Valley appellation. At Peters Vineyard, the southernmost vineyard in the blend, the fruit receives cooling coastal influences with heavier morning and evening fog. Windsor Oaks represents a warmer region of the appellation, with less fog and warmer days during the growing season. Leras Family Vineyard lies in the central part of Russian River Valley, where morning fog burns off earlier, leaving the sun to heat the summer air and lending a nice balance to the grapes. Saralee’s Vineyard is at a slightly higher elevation and closer to the Russian River, which offers another dimension to the flavor profile of the grapes.
To get just the right balance of flavors, we carefully select the correct percentage of wine from each vineyard to complete our clonal blends. Although we only make a very limited amount of our clonal-designate wines, it is worth the effort to find them and try them for yourself. A treat for any Pinot lover will enjoy. |
Our Zinfandels
When we first started producing Zinfandel folks would ask, “Why make Zin when you have all these wonderful Pinot Noirs?” Well try as we might, Pinot Noir just didn’t go with every meal we eat, so we had to make a Zin!
In 2003, we were able to source some outstanding Russian River Valley Zinfandel from a couple of our Pinot Noir growers. We loved the results and have expanded from one Zinfandel to three—two single-vineyard designates and the Russian River Valley blend that originally launched our Zins.
Today we get Zinfandel from three vineyards in Russian River Valley—Elsbree, Windsor Oaks and Forchini Vineyards—and two in Dry Creek Valley—Pauline’s Vineyard (owned by the father of Randy Peters of Peters Vineyard) and Timbercrest Farm, a vineyard on the same property as our winery.
As with our Pinots, the Zinfandels are kept separate by vineyard during fermentation and throughout barrel aging. When the Zin grapes first arrive, we cold-soak them for three days. Once fermentation has begun, we hand punch down the grapes in open-top fermenters, a method not commonly used with Zinfandel. The Zins are barrel aged in French oak for 12 to17 months. Again we taste through every barrel before deciding what wines will be used in each of the three finished Zinfandels.
Our Zinfandels express the fruit and the appellation variations from year to year, but the method in which they are produced doesn’t change. They are always food-friendly and ready for a party! Aren’t we all? |
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