2023 Glou Glou

56% Zinfandel | 33% Carignan | 6% Sangiovese | 5% Valdiguié

Gary Venturi Vineyard and Larry Venturi Vineyard in Mendocino County. Frei Vineyard in Solono Green Valley. All of these vineyards are organically farmed.

2023 was a banner year for Glou Glou. We had a long and cool vintage and started with a rather large crop of Zinfandel, which we worked to get into balance by removing clusters. We had quite a small crop of Carignan but the quality was extraordinary. In all, we were rewarded with perfect big, juicy berries for making Glou Glou. These big berries create the generous but lithe wines that we love for blending up this cuvée. Since the weather was mild, we have the ideal chemistry in this wine with a low pH and ideal acidity.

This Glou Glou is certainly a food wine, in fact, it begs for food. It has enough acid to stand up to your favorite tomato sauce, as well as intense berry notes that perfectly complement the char of a burger or perfectly cooked pizza crust. Serve this slightly chilled, and you will be the hero of your next backyard barbecue—this is the most refreshing red wine ever, and the perfect antidote to long summer days and the heat of the grill. On the nose it is a sea of aromatic black plum, red licorice and raspberry with undertones of clove and hawthorn as it opens up in the glass. On the palate is intense and fleshy with flavors of red plum, hibiscus, pomegranate, and cocoa powder with a long spicy finish.

To make this light style red wine we used many different vinification methods including carbonic maceration, traditional skin maceration, and what we call reverse saignée. The goal is always to make a layered, cohesive blend and build complexity by combining many small lots — 13 in this case. A few of the lots were fermented with carbonic maceration, a gentle process that helps to keep early-harvest wines from becoming too tannic. After 12 days, we heated up the tanks and pumped them over for two days before we pressed the juice off its skins and fermented natively in tank after 10ppm sulfur was added. Reverse saignée is when we whole cluster press tannic red grape varieties and then add that juice to a red wine fermentor. This is a way to increase the juice to skin ratio to make a lighter red wine. Then, to keep the wine bright and fresh, about one third of the lots were aged in barrels and rest were aged in stainless steel tanks. This wine received a small amount of sulfur and was filtered prior to bottling. We filter this wine because it really makes the fruit pop and it allows us to get by with very little sulfur use.

Download a technical data sheet here.

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