2024 Slipper Sippers Nouveau

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A Nouveau is born! Nouveau is the name given to the first wine of the vintage. The style originated out of Beaujolais, just south of Burgundy where they make wines from Gamay Noir using the technique carbonic maceration. In carbonic maceration, open top tanks that have been inertized with carbon dioxide are filled with whole cluster grapes and then sealed for a number of days. Pioneering wine chemist and natural winemaker Jules Chauvet employed the technique in the mid 20th century to make light, fruit, and delicious wines. This is essentially how we made this wine!

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Label Art by Sara Rabin

49% Zinfandel | 33% Carignan | 16% Petite Sirah | 7% Vermentino

All of the grapes used for this blend are farmed organically. Harvest was very late this year and we were fortunate enough to have some wonderful grape sources in Lodi where grapes tend to ripen earlier. Cherryhouse was planted in the 40’s, , Leticia in the 40’s, and the Gary Venturi vineyard was planted in the mid 50’s. The Vermentino is a recent planting and we love it in the blend.

The wine is mega delicious. It has a nose full of raspberry, marionberry, red plum and cocoa. There are gobs of raspberry, chocolate covered cherry, and boysenberry on the juicy palate. The acidity is balanced and zippy and in the finish there is cocoa powder-like tannin that keeps the wine fresh on the palate.

The pick dates for this wine were between August 19th and September 18th. To make this wine we employed several different winemaking techniques. We believe that layering differing winemaking methods and varieties creates a wine with a lot of intrigue. We really don’t like cookie cutter one-note wines. We used carbonic maceration for half of the Zinfandel and all of the Carignan, this is a perfect method for grapes that are picked earlier with higher acidity. After 10 days of carbonic maceration at about 55F, we warmed up the tanks and gave them a daily pump over for three days to get a bit more color and a cleaner ferment. After this period we pressed the grapes lightly added 10ppm SO2 and fermented each lot separately in a warm tank. Once the wines were dry we stored them cool for a number of weeks and got quite good settling and clarity. The Petite Sirah was fermented with a 25/75 reverse saignee; meaning we direct pressed 75% of the fruit and added to the balance, which was destemmed. The remaining zinfandel was a regular destemmed ferment and the vermentino was whole cluster pressed and barrel fermented. Two days before bottling we racked the tank and added 15ppm SO2 to protect from any oxygen the wine picked up during bottling.

Download a technical data sheet here.

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Produced + Bottled by Las Jaras Wines in Sebastopol, CA