Thanks for the early notes, Morgan!!!
This is a very exciting release!
As Mr Twain-Peterson pointed out in the âSanta Clara & San Benito Wine Heritageâ thread, the âVineyard Under the Mountainâ is the very same plot of old vines that was formerly known as the âMaria Carter Vineyardâ, used by David Bruce for some of his early wines.
With the Bedrock âWirz Vineyardâ Riesling, this makes two wines in the upcoming release that are derived from a historically significant, often overlooked, grape growing region of California.
I got on the list starting with the 2012 vintage. My first tastes of the heritage wines were only 2-3 years after bottling. While I enjoyed them, I preferred the single vineyard zins and cut back on heritage buying for a couple years. Now, revisiting some 12âs and 13âs now that they have a little age on them, I am amazed at how beautifully these field blends evolve and the elegance that they show. I am realizing now that I made a mistake cutting back and plan to correct that with this offering. Where do many of you find the sweet spot to be in their drinking windows?
Everyone will have their own opinions on this but for me I try to wait at least 5 years on most of the heritage wines, with the one exception being Dolinsek (and sometimes the Weil mixed blacks)
The only thing that might keep me to 2 cases on this is the fact that the NC Syrah, OVZ, Bedrock V, and Carlisle V are all in the Fall and Winter releases. Never thought I would be so happy not to see any of those.
It tends to be a very small berried and loose-clustered site and we have trouble liberating enough juice for adequate early pumpovers by foot-trodding alone.
It was just getting to be too much to manage and there were others things I wanted to focus on. Michael and I had an amicable parting of ways on the project and he will continue to make the Albo and Godello under his Cave Dog label, which he makes at BWC.
In this case it is all one ferment. We trod the whole-cluster element and then crush some over the top to create more juice for early pumpovers. How much we trod is dependent on how much carbonic character we want to create in the wine. If we have multiple lots then we might play with varying levels of whole-cluster (for instance this vintage we have 100%, 50% and 0% WC lots of Bien Nacido X-Block that we will eventually compose a final blend of).
