2022 Old Vines Carignan

100% Carignan

This is a single-vineyard wine, the grapes come from the Lee Testa Vineyard in the Calpella area of Mendocino County, near Ukiah. The vineyard is on the benchlands to the west of the valley, and is farmed by Gary Venturi, who owns the vineyard next door.

These old vines were planted in the mid-1960s. The vineyard is dry-farmed organically. The soils are Yokayo series sandy loam that is very well drained. Due to Gary’s fastidious suckering and canopy management, this is an incredibly clean vineyard and gets only one or two sulfur dustings per season.

This wine opens up with a nose of super intense red licorice (Twizzlers even), pomegranate, and dried cherry. The palate is quite expressive with flavors of bright cherry, raspberry, mineral, and spice. There is a controlled mid-palate that will expand with time if you allow it to open up. The finish is long with mineral intensity and quite supple tannin. This wine is a perfect partner to pair with chargrilled foods or Tandoori meats.

In 2022 we had a cool growing season till it wasn’t! We achieved temperatures of 120F in the vineyard, but thankfully Carignan is a survivor and can take the heat. Gary has a few vines of golden Chasellas growing at the foot of the block, so we have him add them in with the pick every vintage. When the hand-picked grapes arrived at the winery, we destemmed them and dumped them into an open-top tank for fermentation. No sulfur was added and we warmed the tank to 76ºF to initiate native fermentation. The must was treated to one light punchdown per day to just wet the cap. We drained the tank after 19 days, and this wine represents the free run fraction only, which was transferred to various large format and a few new 228L Stockinger barrels. The wine was aged in a cool room where it underwent native malolactic fermentation and aging for 10 months. We racked the barrels about six weeks before bottling and then back to clean barrels. The wines were racked a second time a few days before bottling, when the wine was limpid. This is our method of creating clean wines that don’t require fining or filtration. The only addition in this wine is a small amount of sulfur.

Production: 305 cases | ABV: 12.54% | TA: 6.7 g/L | pH: 3.45 | VA: 0.61 g/L | DCO2: 681ppm | Total SO2: 44ppm | RS: 1.1 g/L | Turbidity at bottling: 12.72 NTU

Download a technical data sheet here.

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