Gold Medal!

Super happy that our 2021 Pinot Noir from the Santa Cruz Mountains won a Gold medal at the 2024 San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition, the largest competition of North American wines.

2021 was a great year. We picked the grapes on September 25, which is late for the Santa Cruz Mountains. However, the extra hang time allowed the grapes to develop fully and reach optimal phenolic ripeness. We fermented the wine at 25-27C for about ten days and left it on the skins for another seven days before pressing. We pressed the wine of the skins and transferred it to new American oak barrels (228L), where it was left for 14 months before we bottled it.

The taste is true to the Santa Cruz Mountains terroir with high acidity, balanced by the rich red fruit and silky, smooth tannins. It has a pronounced red cherry flavor that I absolutely love, with notes of herbs and spices. The oak is well integrated, creating an elegant wine with intensity.

Harvest 2022

Another fun week making wine in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The yield was down about 1/3 compared to last year due to heavy spring rain that damaged the flowering (we call it “shatter” when a grapevine’s delicate flowers don’t pollinate and develop into grapes). The Chardonnay grapes suffered from excessive powdery mildew also due to the early rain, so we got a limited crop this year. However, the fruit we did harvest was outstanding and of high quality.

This year, we decided to focus on making sparkling wine, rosé, and Port-style wines. We have so much Pinot Noir red wine in the cellar, and it’s always fun to focus on other wine styles. We pressed the Pinot Noir grapes whole-bunch (no destemming) in our new horizontal press, and the juice was rich in sugar, acidity, and flavors (yummy). We let the juice settle overnight and then made a 100% Pinot Noir sparkling base wine (Blanc de Noirs) and a 100% Pinot Noir rosé. The acidity was higher than last year, so we expect both wines to have a fresh fruit profile with a crisp and zappy edge.

We dried about ½ ton of Pinot Noir grapes on our drying racks in a cold space to further concentrate the sugar, flavors, and acidity. This is a similar technique to how you make Amarone wines (known as Appassimento), and I learned to use it for Port-style wines when I failed to make an Amarone-style red wine five years ago, as the grapes got so concentrated I couldn’t ferment the juice. The fermentation is still going and will probably take another 30 days before it reaches the right alcohol/sugar level. More to come!

2022 Harvest

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BeauZini – Zinfandel

This is a family favorite. The fruit came from an old vineyard in the Lodi AVA in California, where the average age of the vines is 90 years. We fermented the grapes in three different ways: hot fermentation (28-29C), cold fermentation (19-20C), and Carbonic Maceration (similar to Beaujolais wines), and blended the wines at the end. The wine was aged for 18 months in new American oak barrels hence oaky notes. The name “BeauZini” came from the Beaujolais method and Zinfandel, the grape variety.

Here are the tasting notes:
Intense and attractively oaky. Delicious ripe dark plush plum and damson concentrated fruit muddled with a lovely touch of characterful spice. Well-integrated spicy oak and lovely fine-grained tannins with a pure, balanced long finish. It is intense with a smooth taste, and a long finish.

Cellar 777 – Sparkling Wine

We are making our Sparkling wines with Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes from the Santa Cruz Mountains AVA. The Thurston vineyard is located at around 1,000 feet elevation. The elevation is critical as in the Summer, the Monterey Bay brings fog to the lower elevations. This cools the evenings down, a trait that Pinot loves. The typical morning starts out cool and slowly warms as the movement of the morning air flow caused by the fog pulls back. These are ideal conditions for Pinot Noir and retain the acidity, which is great for sparkling wines.

We pick the Pinot Noir and Chardonnay grapes early and cold ferment them around 20C for 5-7 days. This creates a fresh and fruity wine that is used as our base wine Using the time-honored way, similar to Champagne (Methode Champenoise), we add yeast and sugar to the base wine and bottle it, for the secondary fermentation to happen in the bottle. We leave the wine for two years before we remove the dead yeast and get the wine ready.

Our 2018 Sparkling Wine won Bronze at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.

Cellar 777 – Syrah

This is our ‘household’ wine grown on our own property in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California. The vines are around 20 years old and well taken care of. It is known as a ‘John Alban Syrah’ and it produces an elegant, floral and compelling Syrah. In the Rhone wine district in France, it is called “Serine” and it originated in Côte Rôtie. It is now highly sought after by vignerons and is the basis of many new plantings. Syrah originated in the Rhone Valley over 2000 years ago.

We pick our Syrah grapes around end of August and beginning of September and aim for an alcohol of around 14.5% abv. We ‘cold ferment’ our Syrah wines around 20C for 10-14 days and leave the wine on the skins (cold maceration) for another 10-12 days to full extract the colors and tannins. We then move the wine into new American oak barrels to be matured for 24-30 months. This is longer than average, but we feel the wine develops really well and softens the tannin over time in oak barrels.

Our 2016 Syrah won Silver at the California State Fair, and our 2017 Syrah won Gold at the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition.