2020 Grenache Head Held High

Grenache, how do you balance being so powerful, flashy, hedonistic, extroverted, generous, and yet, stay so light on your toes? It's a real headscratcher, a thing of beauty. Our practice is to rule with an iron fist in the vineyard. That begins with aggressive pruning, shoot thinning, reducing the number of clusters per vine, cluster shaping, leafing, hedging, another round of dropping fruit at the end of the season, and then, of course, meticulous hand sorting at the winery. The grenache vine wants to grow with great vigor and produce an abundance of fruit, but it is our job to tame the beast and not be greedy. "better to have a little bit of gold than a lot of shit," as my old man likes to say. We took our gold nuggets and gave them all the attention they demanded during fermentation. Each fermentation is unique unto itself, and this baby girl turned out to be a night owl with most of the strenuous demands needing to be met between the hours of 1am-4am.

The resulting wine sports a deep crimson robe, full-bodied, with salivating notes of fresh picked strawberries, apricots, garrigue and firm tannins. In contrast to our white wine and syrah, we imparted very little new French oak. This is partly because we included a large percentage of whole clusters during fermentation (51%), which provide substantial tannins, structure and longevity on their own without the need for any additional support from the wood. The mixture of used oak incorporated during élevage range in size from 228L to 650L. After many blending sessions we opted to include 9% syrah, 10% mourvèdre and 4% white wine into the cuvée just prior to bottling. Bon appétit!

Edit this Article