2022 Big Beautiful Buff

100% Albariño

Produced + Bottled by Las Jaras Wines, Sebastopol, CA

Label Art by Angelfire

Description

Albariño done right is fresh, saline, and mineral-laden, making it the perfect candidate for Big Beautiful Buff, our new series of sexy crisp white wines. We jumped at the opportunity to try out some of the Spanish variety for the 2022 vintage. This wine is akin to our Chenin Blanc in that we picked the grapes quite early to preserve freshness and then achieved a layered, mineral expression by fermenting and aging in different vessels. We love how the wine turned out because it has all of the varietal typicity that we wanted to capture. Like opaque sunshine in the glass, it has aromas of apple blossom, meyer lemon, and honeydew melon. The palate is bone dry with flavors of yellow nectarine, white cherry, and wet rock. Mineral density gives the wine a long savory and mouthwatering finish. This wine is best with lighter fare and also spicy Vietnamese of Thai cuisine. Try it with laarb, bún chay, or goi ga.

Vineyard

The grapes for this wine come from the Bokisch Vineyard in Clements Hills, in the eastern foothills of Lodi. The grapes are organically grown on Redding and Yellowlark gravely loam soils. The area is quite warm and at an elevation of 138 ft but is cooled in the evenings by the Delta Breeze.

Winemaking

We opted to press the grapes at the Bokisch winery about 100 yards from the vineyard block instead of trucking the grapes in the sun to Sebastopol about three hours away. We were there to make sure the juice was pressed whole-cluster to our specifications. There was no skin contact because we did not want to interrupt the delicacy of the variety. The juice was settled for 24 hours before being trucked to the winery for fermentation after a 10ppm SO2 addition. Often times we add a bit of sulfur at this stage to delay malo-lactic bacteria from exploiting the juice and to avoid creating volatile acidity compounds. We heated the tank and native fermentation started about seven days later. We started the fermentation in a stainless steel tank and then transferred the juice to two 1200L sandstone jarres and two 800L neutral demi muids.  The wine underwent native malo-lactic fermentation. After four months, I transferred that volume to a concrete egg and this is the resulting wine. After five months of aging, we racked the wine off its lees in preparation for bottling. This wine was bottled without fining or filtration. This means the wine may be hazy or have a deposit, but this is nothing to be worried about!

Technical Data

Production: 515 cases | ABV: 12.69% | TA: 5.29 g/L | pH: 3.46 | VA: 0.59 g/L | DCO2: 1240ppm

Total SO2: 38ppm | RS: 0.66 g/L | Turbidity at bottling: 9 NTU

Download a technical data sheet here.

Important Shipping Info

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