Palate
The perfect 2002 vintage offers generous perfume and extract. Flavors of Blue Mountain
marionberry, licorice, marshmallow, black cherry and roses fill the nose and echo on the
smooth palate. Aromatically intense with velvety texture and rich as a young wine now, we
are confident this wine will have a long life in your cellar.
Harvest
Harvested October 12th, the syrah and cabernet sauvignon were perfectly ripe. Sugars of 26
brix and 24 brix respectively made a natural blend of 13.8% alcohol after traditional hand
punchdown in open top fermenters. These wines provided generous total organic acids and
a naturally high pH of over 3.90, but we do not change the natural pH balance of the wine.
Bottling
Bottled unfiltered on February 27th, 2004.
Winemaking
The wines fermented on skins for
over two weeks, and were basket pressed with only free-run used. For several months, we
raised our syrah on its lees. As with our chardonnays, lees contact develops a better
complexity and is longer lasting than the flavors of lots of smoky new barrels.
Aging
The wine was
aged 16 months in mature French Rhone barrels, of which only a small number were new.
After bottling sixteen months later, we further aged this wine a year
before release. The traditional bottle aging before sale offers you our wine rested and full of
character.
