Full Pull

• By Paul Zitarelli
  Full Pull Exclusive Bubbly, 4/16/2017

  (NV Full Pull & Friends Blanc de Blancs Brut Nature D17 (FPF-20) Hello friends. We have the return today of one of the most popular wines we offer each year: our Full Pull & Friends bubbly, made exclusively for our list members. Each of the previous two disgorgements have both sold out within a week. This wine has just been an amazing, delightful phenomenon. I’m really tickled by the support you folks give this particular project. Let’s begin by translating the trio of jargon-soaked acronyms in the wine name: NV means non-vintage (or, really, several vintages), fairly typical for sparkling wines. D17 means the wine was disgorged in 2017, and you can find that information on the label, too (look for a D.2017 near the bottom right-hand corner). I think it’s important to note the disgorgement date someplace on bottles of bubbly. Otherwise you don’t know if you’re dealing with juice disgorged five years ago or five minutes ago. And FPF-20 means that this is the 20th Full Pull & Friends wine since we kicked this program off in 2013. Of the other 19, all but 2 are sold out, and 1 of those is getting close to last-call territory (see this page for details on the program). Okay, so, some background on this project. Well, I’ll begin with something I’ve said before and will say again: sparkling wine is emotional currency in my house. When Full Pull started back in 2009, my wife and I developed a simple agreement. Her responsibility: supply several years of steady income and health insurance. My responsibility: keep at least one case of sparkling wine on hand at all times. It seemed like a reasonable bargain at the time, and it has served us well since. I first got the bug in my brain about a Full Pull & Friends sparkling wine when I visited Treveri Cellars in May 2014 on a research trip for Seattle Magazine. That was my first chance to see Treveri’s production facility and to meet Christian Grieb. The facility seemed plenty big enough to support custom bottling, and Christian and I hit it off right away, in no small part due to our shared obsession with your MLS Cup champion Seattle Sounders Football Club. Later that year, Chip McLaughlin (long time list members will remember his well-loved Vinyl Wines project) was pouring at an event for Treveri, and he and I discussed the concept further. From that point on, things only picked up momentum quickly. If there’s one category of wine that unites the entire FP team, it’s sparkling wine. So this project had to happen. Christian and his team at Treveri have been terrific to work with. We knew we wanted a 100% Chardonnay blanc de blancs project, and they let us work with specific lots of juice. A majority of our wine comes from a single vineyard: Harold Pleasant’s Pleasant Vineyard in a cool pocket of the Yakima Valley that, according to Christian, “grows absolutely brilliant sparkling cuvee fruit.” There are also 20%-ish chunks from Ramos Vineyard on Snipes Mountain (“great soils and great cool climate for Chard”) and from Hilltop Vineyard, “a site near Zillah that was planted by the great Walter Clore. He recommended that site be planted in Chardonnay, and the vines are 30+ years old. They sing beautifully for bubbles!” We also knew we wanted a very dry style of bubbly. Like last year, we settled on dosage of three grams per liter, right at the upper end of the Brut Nature category, and drier, I believe, than anything Treveri releases regularly. I think we all continue to love the alpine fruit and mineral characters that are most prominent at the lowest sugar levels. Our bubbly also saw extended time on the lees, a full 24 months before disgorgement and bottling a few weeks ago. This wine shipped over to Seattle soon thereafter, and we’ve since given it time to get over any disgorgement shock. I’m thrilled that it is ready just in time for (rumored) spring and summer. It clocks in at 12% alc and begins with a fresh, expressive nose combining stone fruits (peach, apricot) and tree fruits (apple, pear) with leesy subtleties of a good loaf of oat bran bread. With time and air, complexities both lactic (crème fraiche) and mineral come to the fore. The mouthfeel is – by design – just as lean and dry and racy as can be, a nervy mouthful of bubbly that hums across the palate with energy to spare and leaves you with a mouthwatering mineral finish. While you could certainly put a hard chill on this and drink it as a cocktail, it’s a ridiculously versatile food pairing wine, one that works with corned beef hash and eggs in the morning, a vinaigrette-dressed green salad in the afternoon, a roast chicken for dinner, and a nighttime bucket of buttered popcorn at the movie theater.