2020 Trousseau Gris

This is the second vintage of our Trousseau Gris from Fanucchi Wood Road Vineyard in the Russian River Valley. We learned a lot from making the wine in 2018 so we knew we wanted to grab the fruit a bit earlier for this vintage. Picking grapes early doesn’t always result in a better wine, but in this case, the freshness and nerve that we want is lost once the grapes get to about 19 brix. With this in mind, we pick this grape before the pH goes up to achieve a wine with firm acidity, minerality, and a purity of fruit. This wine is really fun to experience as it opens up in the glass. At first, it is stony and mineral with lots of white nectarine on the palate. As it opens up and the temperature comes up, the stony aromatics begin to mingle with a bit of white cherry, jasmine and honeycomb. The palate firms up with apricot and bitter orange and an intense minerality that builds through the finish. It will be interesting to watch this wine age! 

We love how food-friendly this wine is since it’s delicate enough for lighter fare but also stands up to the heat of spicier cuisine. Think a smoked trout salad with a tangy vinaigrette or an Isaan-style papaya salad.  

The grapes for this wine come from Fanucchi Wood Road Vineyard, which is also famous for its Zinfandel. These old vines were planted in 1981 to a quadrilateral trellis system, high off the ground to reduce the risk of frost. The soils are sandy loam and the vineyard is sustainably farmed. Peter Fanucchi says he farms “organic in theory” — whatever that means. We will just call it “conventional with weeds.” This is pretty much the only Trousseau Gris vineyard in the United States; there are other places to find the variety, but they are very small plantings. Greg Lafollette — who started Flowers Winery — said that he used to add it to their Sonoma Coast Chardonnay to tame the acid profile a bit. 

Whenever we make a wine, one of our main considerations is how to make it super sexy. To us, this means full of intrigue, bone dry, lightly textured, and mineral. Trousseau Gris is conventionally made with skin contact but we knew that for the type of wine we wanted to make, it had to be direct to press. Since Trousseau Gris is a low acid and high pH variety, skin contact would have further raised the pH and resulted in a wine that was blocky, salty and not sexy. We settled the juice for 24 hours before racking to another tank for fermentation. Once fermentation started natively, we transferred the juice to a concrete egg and a demi-muid (600 liter barrel with 40mm thick staves). Fermentation lasted about two weeks and the wine was aged for 10 months on its lees. We racked about a month before bottling and then returned the wine to its original vessels. Just before the bottling date, we racked the wine to a tank for bottling. It was bottled without fining or filtration. The wine may throw a haze or may have a deposit, but this is nothing to be worried about; instead rejoice!

ABV: 12.4% | TA: 5.7 g/L | pH: 3.25 | VA: 0.77 g/L | DCO2: 1030ppm 

Total SO2: 43ppm | RS: 1.2 g/L | Turbidity at bottling: 2 NTU 

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Our technical data sheets are available to view and download here.