From the Producer:

Picking Dates, Tonnages, Tons/Acre: September 14 5.34 tons (2.87 tons/acre).

Vinification: Three fermenters, two of which were entirely destemmed and one that was done with 50% whole clusters.

Winemaking: Fermentations were managed by a combination of pumpovers early in the process and exclusively prior to fermentation beginning as well as pigeages to ensure gentle handling, extraction and delicate tannin construction. Cold soaks were generally 3-4 days. Full fermentation from beginning to pressing was at 17 days. 24-48 hour settling prior to being racked to barrel. All wines on full lees until assemblage for bottling. Bottled without fining or filtration.

Barrels: For this 12-barrel bottling 1 new Cadus barrel was used with 11 neutral barrels.

Notes: Our first vintage with Wind Ridge in 2018 largely has determined our ability to get a handle on the site and the style of wine it wanted to produce. We screwed it up. Lesson learned. We simply picked it too late. It seemed like the right call at the time but what we ended up with was massively dense, supremely dark and very, very ripe stuff. While not the first thing we pick this is now routinely picked in the first half of our harvest and the results have borne themselves out that this is what this block requires. It falls into the category of vineyards that produce fruit that if it tastes ripe to you in the vineyard you are somewhat too late already. What that means for this wine is that the essence of the site is to produce very dark fruited wine, black currant and loganberry for instance, but those are powerful flavors that do best with some measured restraint. The use of whole clusters also helps pull in the fruit density and level up the tannins. So, this is a blacker and somewhat bigger wine but very much in keeping with the span of the Ribbon Ridge AVA. This finished with a TA of 6.0, a pH of 3.48 and was bottled with under 25 ppm free SO2 and less than 70 ppm total SO2.

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