AROMA: boysenberry, tar, lavender
FLAVOR: violet pastille, Morello cherry, cacao
FOOD PAIRINGS: violet pastille, Morello cherry, cacao
VINIFICATION: 4.6 tons of old vine Carignan hand-harvested on Sep 30th. Fruit was field sorted in the vineyard to ensure only choice clusters were used. We foot tread it, then fermented beneath a submerged cap with 100% whole clusters for 15 days. The free run juice was racked to neutral oak where it spent 18 mos undisturbed. Bottled unfined/unfiltered.
SITE: From a historic Mendocino vineyard pitched on the lofty slopes above Cloverdale, these 70 year-old, dry-farmed, head-trained vines are farmed by the indefatigable Jim McCutchen. Planted on south-facing exposures at 2200-2400 feet on a mix of hard shale and clay soil. This rapidly vanishing California grape variety - made in this ‘old-timey’ way - harkens back to the Golden State’s earliest winemaking efforts.
NOTES: In the spring of 2021, we made several trips to Jim McCutchen's mountain-top Carignan vineyard. We separated the vineyard into four blocks, with a qualitative hierarchy, and designated the choice piece called MAIN BLOCK for our Sativa bottling. This block in the tenderloin of the property has always been dry-farmed on stony soils. It was hand-planted by Jim and his father in the early 1960s. We returned in August and green dropped some clusters from the shorter shoots. On the morning of Sept 30th, in the midst of a historic heat storm, we harvested it, foot tread it, and fermented it on 100% whole bunches beneath a submerged cap. We drained the free run juice, and gave it a long slumber in our best puncheon barrels. Sixteen months later, the 2022 Sativa was bottled unfined/unfiltered. Result? A saturated, deeply flavored Sativa. It's as if the dreaded heat before harvest actually benefitted this wine—helped to fully ripen the fruit's prodigious tannins. Lesson learned.
