Even though the Berserkers offer is closed feel free to check out our website, and we have a $275 mixed case offer that is live. Thanks everyone!
First, big thanks to Todd, Patrick, and the Berserker community. Prima Materia is a little late getting here, but extremely thrilled and honored to finally make it on board. We have been planting grapes and making wine in Lake County since 2008, living out a fascination with Italian grapes and clean/minimalist neoclassical winemaking for a while now. We are probably best know for our Sangiovese, Barbera, and Aglianico, but we have 13 different cultivars – mostly Italian – planted on 10 acres at 1,500’ in the Kelsey Bench AVA of Lake County, just over the hill from Napa and Sonoma counties. “We” are a 1.3-person operation, and pretty small at about 1,500 estate bottled cases per year – most of which we sell through our tasting room in Oakland, Ca. and https://www.prima-materia.com.
Quick bio: I grew up with agriculture on a 40-acre ranch among French Colombard and Carignan vines in the late 70’s/early 80’s in pre-Russian River Valley Sonoma County, Ca. Not sure what to do with that, I eventually settled down in Portland, and started working in kitchens after realizing that a philosophy/history degree was way too slow. Wanting to earn my culinary chops as quickly as possible, I did everything from feeding thousands at banquets, burger consulting, and a brief pastry stint (I sucked) to Michelin-starred fine dining. While working at Terra in Napa Valley, I helped my father plant vines on a small 10-acre block of land in Lake County, which kindled a growing interest in wine. After taking a summer break from cooking to help with harvest 2007, I was fully hooked, and from 2008 on I have been working and planting that vineyard in Lake County. Barolo was my a-ha wine in 2008, so an Italian varietal focus was inevitable, and I have always been a texture-and-earth first guy, even when cooking. Lake County grapes have no shortage of fruitiness, and since I am fascinated by the intricacies of those textural and unpindownable secondary notes (cedar, leather, olive, those old-world profiles) I’m in a good place to really focus on those elements, knowing that the sunny climate at 1,500’ will provide ripe tannins and fruit, then I can work on long fermentations, careful vine management, and low-intervention but very cautious aging.
I became a wine geek, so much so that some of my wines are intentionally non-vintage. I don’t have a problem with that. Sometimes multi-vintage can work together with some of the more trying years we have had. 2019 had great body while for us 2020 was a very hot vintage and a little skronky for some wines, and after trials sometimes the sum exceeds the whole. But if it doesn’t, then we don’t do it. Ironically, some of our benchmark wines are regularly non-vintage: Sagrantino, Nebbiolo - 3 vintages in that one, Aglianico and Zinfandel, all killer. A narrative arc or idiosyncratic edges are much more important to me than blending to fill holes, soften, or enrich.
Prima Materia currently has 20 wines on our website, 18 of which are estate grown and bottled. Several are just 1-2 barrels made per year. And yes, some of them are non-vintage. So without further ado…
Since this is our first year, let’s keep it simple. Here is the offer:
#1: The “Try Us Out” 3-pack for $99 with $0-cost shipping. This 3-pack has one bottle each of:
- Dolcetto
- Barbera
- Aglianico
(Basically free shipping which would be 15-35% off depending on where you live)
#2: The “Try Us Out” 6-pack for $165 with $0-cost shipping (roughly 25-30% off including shipping). This 6-pack has one bottle each of:
- Vermentino
- Zinfandel
- Dolcetto
- Barbera
- Nebbiolo
- Aglianico
#3: The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure 6-pack $165 with $0-cost shipping (roughly 30+% off including shipping, depending on choices)
Peruse our 20 wines, and choose any 6 that you want for $165 with $0-cost shipping.
#4: The Choose-Your-Own-Adventure 12-pack for $300 with $0-cost shipping (roughly 40+% off including shipping, depending on choices)
Peruse our 20 wines, and choose any 12 that you want for $300 with $0-cost shipping.
To order or check out all of our bottlings please go to:https://www.prima-materia.com/berserker-day
All of our wines can be found and researched by going to the “shop/wines” tab at the top since the Berserker deals are hidden.
When ordering one of the choose-your-own-adventure 6 or 12-packs, just write in the 6 or 12 bottles and quantities (Nebbiolo 1, Barbera 2, etc.) that you want in the comments section, choose shipping in or out of California, or Bay Area delivery, and that is it! It can be a case of all Chardonnay, or all Nebbiolo! If you want baller Aglianico and Sagrantino and aren’t attached to your tooth enamel? Go for it. Want pretty pretty Grenache and Dolcetto that drinks like fancy Gamay? We make those too. It is a very nice Chard by the way. I will provide brief notes below but please check out the wines on the website for much deeper info. There are even podcasts on many varietals, YouTube videos from 2020’s Covid downer online tastings, blog posts, and technical data sheets to vineyard map on the website. There is a lot of info on the website.
Any questions – just email info@prima-materia.com, hell you can even text me at 707-391-0492. I will try to respond promptly.
Shipping: CA, OR, WA, and AZ will ship via GSO. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area I will personally deliver. Other states will be via UPS. We can’t ship to ND, NH, UT, MS, AL, AR, VT, KY, SD, AK, or HI. Sorry about that - write your local representatives. Sadly we must collect the rather brutal Alameda County of Ca. sales tax, which makes me look like a jerk.
Please remember that someone will need to sign for the shipment, so if shipping to a workplace is best, simply add the delivery address and I will see that it is different than the billing address.
I will start shipping out orders next week - depending on weather and location.
FOR THE WINE GEEKS
Stylistically, Lake County is a pretty warm and higher-altitude growing region, though we can be well below freezing in the winter, summers and warm and sunny with blue skies almost every day. Many of our wines are around the 14% mark, and I do a lot in the vineyard to try to restrain that. That of course is not uncommon for Barbera, Sangiovese, Negro Amaro, etc. even from the old country. Sagrantino is an unstoppable sugar factory, so that is the highest at 14.8% The Dolcetto is 13.0%, and the Zin is like an old-school field blend at an honest 14.01%. The others are all in the middle. Unless you have the palate of a saint, and can regularly distinguish between 13.2 and 13.4% ABV like clockwork, I encourage you to not make choices based on alcohol levels. While too much alcohol is definitely too much, ideology is always the true enemy, and breaking those shackles will get us out of this post-modern mess, but I digress. No, all wines were not in fact 12.5% in the old days. Yes, Nebbiolo, Barbera and Sagrantino have always been high-sugar grapes when managed on the vine. Yes, I have been part of dealcoholization trials, and it is true that you get radically different wines with just a .1% shift in alcohol, but it is not linear, and I’ve experienced the 13.7% feeling hotter than the 14.8%. That said, I try my best…
We get plenty of forward fruit in sunny Lake County, so my job is to build up the earth and spice, stay away from new oak, and give enough barrel time so that structure, earthiness, and then fruit are all in balance, then go unfined and unfiltered. I like lees. A bit of restraint and discipline, a bit of burliness, a dash of feral, and a strong vein of honest thoughtful pretty is the aesthetic goal. The two wines in the lineup that we did not grow are from only 5 miles away btw…
Many of our heavier wines need a little time and air to wake up. We hand bottle our wines, so I force them into a somewhat reduced state before bottling since we can’t get a high speed bottler to the winery. This also helps solidify the Old World world non-fruit aspects and tannic texture that Prima Materia is going for. 15 minutes of air should be good. Less tannic wines like the Dolcetto, Zin, Negro Amaro or Grenache are ready to go. Non-commodity wine is a living thing - give it a little time to wake up, or at least a bit of aggressive swirling, and be rewarded…
Here is a brief overview of wines with 3rd party tasting blurbs - please go to our website for deeper information https://www.prima-materia.com/buy-wine
2018 Chardonnay - Stainless aged, 25-year old vines, “This mellow and minerally wine brings savory elements to the aromas and flavors rather than overt fruity ones, giving it an unusual and interesting complexity. Earthy tones meet subtle fennel and lemon flavors on the palate, and good concentration leads to a lingering finish.” 92 point WE, 13.5% ABV
2019 Vermentino - Medium weight (rather than an acid laser) due to the hot 2020 vintage pre harvest, stainless aged, pure lemon curd goodness from 1,700’ in the Red Hills AVA five miles away from us. 13.7% ABV
2020 Rosés - We make three of them: light and crisp vin gris of Mourvèdre and Zin, medium-weight regular rosé based on Sangiovese, and a dark rosé of Barbera and Algianico that is barrel aged.
Grenache - “This is a gloriously fresh, ripe, light and delicious grenache, offering a totally transparent ruby-brick red hue and winsome aromas of sour cherry and melon, cloves, briers and brambles with a touch of raspberry and its leaf; plenty of lip-smacking acidity holds the wine together, yet it feels almost weightless on the palate; mild tannins, sporting with dust and graphite, provide essential structure.” - Bigger Than Your Head 14.3% ABV
2019 Dolcetto - “This flavorful, smoky and moderately tannic wine offers black-pepper, bell-pepper and charred meat aromas backed by black-fruit flavors. It’s lively, distinctive and offers a good change of pace from the usual French varietals.” - WE (This was cofermented with 10% Chardonnay and has bit of the floral-but-meaty cofermented aspect.) 13.0% ABV
2017 Sangiovese - “The 2017 Sangiovese has notes of red cherry, raspberry, boysenberry, violets, earth, and a touch of cocoa powder, as well as some meaty aromas. The tannins are grippy and the acidity hits the back of the palate and a rush of saliva comes forward. This wine definitely wets the palate and makes you want to enjoy it with food, such as a grilled steak.” - Please the Palate, 14.1% ABV
Zinfandel - The result is an invigorating, high-elevation Zin that had us refilling our glasses and asking why more California producers who work with the variety don’t take a few pages out of Italy’s book… The fruit—wild blackberry, black plum, boysenberry, pomegranate, cranberry, and cherry—is certainly juicy, but not at all in a cloying way; rather, it mirrors the delightful freshness of just-squeezed, unripe forest berries. Accents of damp moss, sage, tobacco smoke, freshly turned earth, and black pepper add savory layers of complexity to a Zinfandel that reminds us how good this variety can taste when it’s not masked by aggressive winemaking and excessive ripeness. - Somm Select, 14.01% ABV
2019 Negro Amaro - “This fascinating, full-bodied and complex wine offers an unusual and intriguing array of roasted chestnut, wild-blackberry and grilled herb flavors on a full body with moderate tannins. It demands repeated sipping and savoring to tease out its many nuances.” 93 points WE, 14.3% ABV
2018 Barbera - “This big, bold and generous wine grown at 1,450-feet elevation in red volcanic soil has great fruit concentration and a velvety texture of fine-grained tannins. It is deep, concentrated and nicely mouthcoating.” - 92 points, WE, 14.5% ABV (I will add that this is 3 different clones, all fermented separately since they have different fruit characteristics, trying to preserve that pomegranate layer and blackberry layer from the vineyard blocks.)
2019 Cabernet Sauvignon - Released this week, so no reviews yet! Not surprisingly for us, an earthy take on Cab but still full of plum fruit first with red and black in the background, surprisingly good acidity and classic moderate tannin, full without being heavy. The numbers were perfect, nothing added, unfined, unfiltered, and very focused. 19 months in barrel, 26-day maceration. From a vineyard 5 miles away from ours on former Clear Lake lakebed. 14.18% ABV
Nebbiolo - Just released, no reviews yet. In the NorCal warm-climate tradition of being closer to Barbaresco than Barolo (bite your tongue idyllic Santa Barbara oversaturated fruit) but with hints of the truffle and leather tones definitely there. Classic tannin, a little less acidity than our Italian counterparts but still vibrant, crushed raspberry and cranberry, fig, and we got the florals of rose and violet already. A strategic blend of 2017, 2018, and 2019 vintages. Let it breath my friends! I am excited for where this will be in a couple years. 14.4% ABV
Refosco - A divisive grape, some finding it bitter and metallic, others smooth. The prior vintage had a fascinating bloody iodine streak while this one is subdued. “The color shades through black to purple to magenta; notes of spiced and macerated red currants, cherries and plums are married to darker hints of loam, graphite and briery forest qualities; this is sleek and lithe on the palate, but with the slight drag of mildly dusty tannins for texture; the oak regimen provides a subliminal shaping effect on the wine’s flow through the mouth, allowing for a structure that’s light, elegant, almost delicate.” - Bigger Than Your Head 14.3% ABV
Sagrantino - Just released as well. I planted the vines in 2012, and 10 years later we are just releasing our second bottling. Sigh. Imagine a Dry Creek Zin punching you in the face repeatedly. A great California-esque fruit core of crushed red berries, high tones of watermelon and rose, then savory cedar, walnut, fig, leather, cardamom, with medium acidity and a wall of fine-grained tannin gluing your wine hole shut. It is a youngin so decant, but it has enough innate pleasure fruit that you could sneak it to your nanna and watch her smile and then wince. Randall Grahm isn’t a fan of the density, and though in lighter wines I want decompressed layers upon layers, I say sometimes you want, nay, need the sticky icky white dwarf of wines. 14.8% ABV
2019 “The Katechon” - 2 barrels made of 50/50 Cabernet Sauvignon and Aglianico blend, not even released yet. This is the odd wine of the lineup with a bit of oak, basically a “modern” (no, not post- post-modern hyper conformist natty) Super Campanian, super forward, super precise going for the Napa hillside profile, maybe Spring Mountain-ish with just a kiss of French oak. Not heavy, if anything the Aglianico tightens the Cabernet’s roundness a hair, puts it in Spanx and pushes some red fruit onto it with a mineral streak, while the Cab ads a little flesh and purple fruit to the Aglianico and polishes the rough edges a bit. Aged in 3-year old Taransaud French oak. 14.5%
Aglianico - “Superconcentrated black-fruit flavors and a firm, grippy texture combine for a powerful expression of this Italian grape variety. Blackberries and boysenberries practically explode on the palate, while good, moderate tannins nicely balance out their fruitiness.” - 92 points, WE, 14.47% ABV
("17 and '18 vintages combined here, 30 months in barrel averaged on lees, over a year in bottle before releasing)
more info: https://www.prima-materia.com/buy-wine
Thanks!