2020 Waves | White Wine

Learn more about the vineyards and wine making process.

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60% French Colombard, 25% Barbera, 15% Chenin Blanc 

2020 marks our second vintage of the Waves white wine. Our goal is to make a canned wine that is bursting with personality and deliciousness. This is a lightly sparkling white wine that is incredibly classy — we are so happy with it. Old vine French colombard, with its light fruitiness, takes us to our happy place. The flavors of this variety on its own are round, with melon and marshmallow notes, but by adding barbera and a touch of chenin blanc, we were able to give the wine more definition and minerality on the palate.  

The 2020 Waves White has aromas of white peach, honeydew melon, and grapefruit along with hints of wet stone. The palate shows melon, grapefruit, and a gentle sparkle and racy acidity. This is the grown-up version of Squirt, the iconic soft drink we enjoyed on hot summer days as kids.

Ricetti Vineyard French Colombard: 94% dry farmed, certified organic  

Testa Vineyard Barbera: 25% certified organic 

Norgard Vineyard Chenin Blanc: 15% conventional certified sustainable (soon organic) 

The Ricetti vineyard is in Redwood Valley, just north of Ukiah, with vines planted in the 1950s. The barbera comes from Testa’s vineyard in Redwood Valley. Norgard Vineyard is in Talmage, just east of the town of Ukiah, and the chenin blanc vines were planted in 1980.

French colombard and barbera are both late-ripening varieties, but we picked them pretty early. The barbera (a red grape variety) was quite heavily cropped, so it had this screaming high acidity and very little color. Although we originally selected the variety for our Rosato, we also thought it would be perfect for the Waves white because it was so linear and cut like a laser. We separated the juice into light and hard press fractions which each saw a 10ppm sulfur addition. After settling for a day, we racked each fraction to a new tank for fermentation. The wines started fermenting naturally after about five days and we transferred to a number of non-stainless steel vessels: large-format oak, concrete eggs and sandstone amphora. We aged the individual wines on their lees for five months, at which point we racked and blended the wines and added some chenin blanc to bring up the minerality. The wine was not fined, but we decided to filter it because when you are drinking wine out of a can, you want that last sip to be as good as the first.

Alc: 11.2% | TA: 5.78 g/L | pH: 3.39 | VA: 0.53 g/L | RS: 0.9 g/L | Malic Acid: 0.0 g/L | Total SO2: 20 ppm | Dissolved CO2 at canning: 3000 ppm  Turbidity at bottling: 0.3 NTU (Filtered