JUICY JUICY JUICY.
I love this wine. Bertus is right, it is not leather and smoke like what I usually expect from Mourvédre. This is crunchy, with turned earth and wet potting soil, ripe blackberry, raspberry, and strawberry. There are also spice notes of cinnamon, allspice, savory plum, umami, chestnuts, and caramel. This is both crushable and layered.
75% Mourvèdre, 25% Syrah
This wine essentially sees three different ferments, and is 75% whole cluster and foot stomped. Bertus is a sucker for texture and mid palette so he obsesses about the ferments and really creates this wine from all these vineyards to be one seamless expression. This wine is aged for 9 months in neutral French oak and is bottled unfined and unfiltered.
2019 Belong Mourvèdre
$42.00
This wine comes from multiple vineyards that widely range in elevation. They are:
David Girard vineyard at 1350 feet
Goldbud vineyard at 2600 feet
Futurnick at 2700 feet
Fenaughty vineyard at 2800 feet (and where the Syrah is grown)
Camino Alto vineyard at 2850 feet
These are some Alpine level vineyards and here is how Bertus puts it:
“Making Mourvedre for the first time from El Dorado we realized that even at 13% alcohol, the wine is not earthy and spicy like you expect.
You’re expecting it to be more on the spicy earthy side of things. And Mourvedre up there just wants to be cranberries and Alpine strawberries and all these bright red things. That’s why we added about 10 percent Syrah to just give you that little puff of pepper and spice and earth.
Instead of fighting that, we don’t want to be super interventionist and have a bunch of additives. We could get more color from more hangtime, but we also know that the pH is going to be really high. So instead of fighting what the region is, we’ve decided to lean in even more, and we are loving the results.”