2019 Cabernet Sauvignon

100% Cabernet Sauvignon

Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma

Produced + Bottled by Las Jaras Wines, Sebastopol, CA

Label Art by Sam Borkson

Description

Our dream when we started Las Jaras was to create an old-school Cabernet Sauvignon that harkened back to the Golden Age of California winemaking, the 1970s, before the era of “Big Flavor.” To achieve this, we had to find the perfect site: someplace with a low diurnal shift, where the daytime highs are warm but not scorching, and nights are reasonably warm. We found an old vineyard on Sonoma Mountain that we worked with from 2015 through 2018. This vineyard was very special and made a Cabernet that was taught and red fruited. Sadly, that vineyard source was too low yielding to be sustainable for the grower, so in 2019 we searched for a new source. We were very fortunate to find Emmitt-Scorsone’s Vinegrove Vineyard in a protected pocket valley in Sonoma’s Dry Creek Valley. The vineyard is really special because although the region is quite warm, the vineyard is protected from getting baked by western sun exposure.

This is certainly the sexiest Cabernet Sauvignon we have made. It has vibrant aromas of cassis, cocoa, and black cherry with subtle notes of licorice and hot rocks. On the palate you’ll find bright and intense black cherry, blackberry, with cocoa and violets. It has a seamless midpalate with fine minerality balanced acidity and refined tannins that lead to a long finish. This beauty will only improve over the next eight years, and will drink well far beyond that.

Vineyards

100 percent Cabernet Sauvignon grown organically at Vinegrove Vineyard. The vineyard is in a secluded glen with gravelly Laughlin loam soil on varying aspects. The vines were originally planted about 30 years ago.

Winemaking

We hand-picked the fruit on September 30, 2019, then destemmed the grapes into a 5-ton tank and a one ton fermentor for fermentation. We warmed the tanks to encourage native fermentation and lightly punched down the must once a day until it started fermenting, at which point we continued with light punchdowns and turned off the heat. Later in the fermentation, we avoided punching down to prevent over-extraction.  We drained the wine at dryness and pressed the skins in a horizontal press. We kept only the free-drain wine for this bottling and aged it in 255-liter Bordeaux barrels, four of which were new. It is hard to believe there is 50% new oak on this wine; you certainly can’t smell or taste it. We aged the wine for 26 months in a cool room where the wines underwent native malo-lactic fermentation. We racked the barrels about a month before bottling and then back to clean barrels. We racked again a few days before bottling and the wine was limpid. This is our method of creating wines that are clean without being filtered. We bottled without fining or filtration.

Technical Data

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