This wine smells like old world on the palate and tastes new world. There is cherry, bright berries, fig, cedar, sandalwood, and leather. The palate is silky smooth, and still carrying that leather and tar that defines great Tempranillo.
The blending of two vineyards seems like a brilliant choice in this bottling, and Gustavo’s intention is to continue to blend in more incredible Tempranillo sites in California, creating the ultimate in CA Temp. I am here for this.
This wine was 100% destemmed. and was allowed to ferment natively. Pump overs occurred twice per day. It spent 22 days on skins and was aged for 22 months all in French oak (33% new). It was racked 4 times through out the aging process, and includes 12% of the solera lot in the final blend.
2019 Orixe Sotelo Tinto Alta
$45.00
“This is our first red that we ever bottled. This is our 2019 Tinta Alta, which we hope to be the SKU that ends up being poured by the glass and that people first become familiar with the brand. We could have done a single vineyard Stagecoach and a single vineyard Shake Ridge off the bat. I just felt it was a little bit too precious to do that, especially with a brand new label. I wanted to make the best blend possible of the two and we came up with Tinta Alta. Tempranillo in Spain has different synonyms, so I thought we should have fun with it and create a synonym for Tempranillo in California since California used to be known as Alta California – Tinta Alta. We try to interweave that story of California being previously part of Mexico and Spain.
The idea is to make the best California Tempranillo that we can imagine as a blend using different vineyard sources that will keep expanding. One of the cool things about Spanish Tempranillo is that they age it so long in barrel and then in bottle because Tempranillo early on tends to have this tootie frutti aspect to it early on, which I call the baby fat. In order to shed that baby fat, I think you need those oxidative rackings and that long time in barrel. We don’t have the time or the budget right now to be able to do that, so one way that I got past it was we actually had a little bit of 2018 Tempranillo from Stagecoach that I bought from a friend. We ended up blending some ‘18 into this with the appellation California and we started building a Solera system of Tempranillo. Over time that solera system is going to be more and more vintages. It allows me to age a little longer a certain portion of the blend, so that I can coax those more leather, tobacco, and more interesting secondary aromas and flavors of Tempranillo without having to wait for the entire blend to age that way.”