{ Red Experiment F2.7 }

When we first started making wine from our vineyard, we didn’t have any history to draw from, so we would most often pick whole blocks and ferment them separately. This allowed us to explore the estate and learn more about the various combinations of clone and rootstock that we had planted – valuable information to be sure. We took note over the years of how the chemistry of the soil shifted across blocks and didn’t necessarily follow our block layout. Intrigued by this, we decided to start picking and fermenting parts of blocks together based on the underlying soil chemistry. Our expectation was that this would give us a more harmonious and transparent expression of our site.

During the summer of 2017, we re-drew the block boundaries of the vineyard so that they reflected the soil chemistry. These areas were sampled separately and harvested separately as well. Based on previous history and intuition, we combined different parts of blocks for fermentation. These wines were aged separately for 14 months, at which point we created a blend of them and aged them for another 8 months prior to bottling.

Throughout the aging and blending, we generally preferred the lots that were co-fermented. They tended to be more complete and displayed greater depth. Additionally, we found that this technique did a better job of capturing the unique areas throughout the vineyard. We were so impressed with the results that this is now standard practice for us.