Use my current location
Region: California - Sierra Foothills - El Dorado
Grapes: Gamay
Alcohol: 12.5%
Notes on the Wine
Electrifying pink color, highlighting blue! Very lively, pretty aromas, and freshness, underlain by a fresh soiltone (clay?) that’s subtle, yet persistent. Strawberry and plum flavors fan out across the palate, focussed by mouth-watering acidity. Utterly delicious, great length. Cries out for another taste!
Winemaking Notes:
Gamay was picked from three separate blocks at Barsotti Ranch on September 2nd, at numbers very close to those from Witters: Brix was 20.3, ph 3.28, and acidity at 6.7 grams per liter. It, too was whole-cluster pressed, and the juice was transferred to stainless to ferment, after settling overnight.
Fermentations began on thei own, and proceeded easily over a couple of weeks, to dryness. The tank was chilled down to around 40 degrees Fahrenheit, and a bit of SO2 was added to block malolactic. The wine, however, had its own ideas, and for the first time ever, our rosé underwent malolactic anyway! (It seems to have been, speaking of anomalies, one of those strange years when the grapes have a much lower level of malic acid, and it takes almost nothing to push the malo through; it happened with our white wine from 2020 also.)
After all the strange and difficult events of 2020, I, for one, am crossing my fingers that it might be an anomalous year, and that things might be calmer in some regards in 2021. We entered the 2020 growing season with less than a third of normal rainfall in the winter that preceded it. In mid-August a freakish “dry thunderstorm” ignited thousands of wildfires around the state of California. I am fortunate that all the grapes I am vinifying come from the upper reaches of the Sierra Nevada foothills, and that no such fires were burning any closer than 130 miles of those grapes.
Even so, there was smoke in the air close to those vineyards for some time before all our grapes were picked. Our first pick, on the 24th of August, was at Witters’ Vineyard; we harvested just over three and one-half tons of Gamay there that morning. The fruit was wonderfully ripe at very modest sugar level: 20.4 Brix. pH was 3.28, total acidity slightly over 7 grams per liter.
