Hello Everyone! After a year hiatus we are very excited to offer our wines again for Berserker Day 2023.
Over the past few years we have continued to evolve and refine Beau Rivage, building on our experience from the 2017 through 2019 vintages that were on offer during Berserker Day 2021.
As a quick refresher, William Kelley and I started Beau Rivage in 2017 based around an organically farmed plot of Chenin Blanc located in Clarksburg, California that is farmed by Wilson Family Vineyards. It’s fermented in used barrels and demi-muids from some of France’s best coopers, and matured on the lees.
As many of you know, William is deputy editor of The Wine Advocate and reviews the wines of Burgundy, Champagne, and Bordeaux in addition to being a regular WB poster. Though I don’t post on Wine Berserkers as frequently as William, I have met quite a few of you through my day job as Head of Hospitality at Rivers-Marie Winery.
So what has changed with the 2020 and 2021 vintage? A lot of our focus in 2017-2019 was directed to figuring out what optimal maturity looks like for the parcel we work with. In Burgundy, one can at least look at what one’s neighbors are doing and taste the results; in Clarksburg, when your neighbor is machine harvested Valdigué, you have fewer reference points to help you dial in the right date! By 2019, we moved towards picking a bit riper, which translates to the vintage with the most texture and volume of the initial trio. With 2020, we picked at about the same maturity, but changed the way we press the grapes to capture brighter acidity (simply put, the less you break the cake of solids during pressing, the lower the pH of the resulting must): the result is that we can pick several weeks later than we did in 2017 and 2018, and actually achieve lower pHs in the finished wine. In 2021, it was time to take that even further, with more crushing of the fruit before pressing to liberate more dry extract; retaining more solids when going to barrel to build more texture and encourage more reduction; and protracting maturation on the lees by fully 8 months to let everything flesh out and knit together. So 2020 in a sense represents somewhat more than the sum of the parts that we figured out with '17, '18, '19, whereas 2021 represents another step towards where we would ultimately like to take Beau Rivage.
We are so pleased with the 2021 vintage that we decided to bottle 10 cases of Magnums specifically for Berserker Day 2023.
So this brings us to the offer!
We are excited to offer a 4-pack of wine that will include (1) Magnum and (1) Bottle of 2021 Beau Rivage Chenin Blanc and (2) bottles of 2020 Chenin Blanc. With the 2020 vintage release we are increasing the bottle price to $38 per bottle (now that the wine has gotten out of the “beta phase”, it is time to stop losing money—and we have a few other projects we’d like to explore in the near future under this label). For Berserker Day 2023 we are offering the wine at our precious vintage price of $28 per 750ml bottle and $80 for the Magnum for a total of $164. The 750 ml bottle of the 2021 is included as a “cellar defender”, with the hope that you might try aging the magnum for a year or two.
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Due to the limited nature of magnums, we will be offering only 1 package per person. Shipping will be a flat rate of $20 per pack.
