Jeremy describes this wine as, “sticking your face in a violet flower bed and then taking a bite of Alaskan mixed berry pie. I find that I drink this wine too quickly without noticing it. Finishes with a mouth coating flowery warmness that lingers.” Our tasting note described this wine as the side tongue emoji, the Miley Cyrus face. This wine is lithe, elegant, and balanced, but then also offers this cheeky playful wild currant hug that reminds you that life is not so serious after all.
The grapes for this wine were fermented with native yeasts for 8 days, with 5% stem inclusion. It was aged in neutral French oak for 14 month on gross lees with no sulfur. Trace sulfur was added at bottling (15 parts per million). Vegan.
248 cases produced.
2020 Riddle Syrah
$34.00
“The Syrah and Grenache are from El Dorado, the David Girard vineyard. The Mansfields farm it, they are a pretty significant farming family out there. Ron (Mansfield) and David (Girard) went to Southeast France and they found slate in the Southern Rhone, and realized they had that same kind of soil here. They came back and decided to plant Rhone varieties in an area that had been mostly Bordeaux varieties. Now they have Grenache, Mourvèdre, Marsanne, Roussanne and Vermentino. It’s organic as well. It’s been organic for 12 or 13 years.
I was going to start the brand in 2020. It was a buyer’s year, with the whole pandemic happening. There were all sorts of grapes for sale everywhere. I reached out to everybody that was growing organically and I think I toured 20-something vineyards and this one just stuck out to me. It was the only one that just seemed healthy. There were animals, there were bugs, there were flowers, there was actual life. Even if places farm organically with no pesticide and herbicide, sometimes things are still out of balance if you try to control too much. They seemed to have a system that was alive and had its checks and balances, to where disease can’t get too out of control on its own. It just seemed healthy.
I worked with him during the smoke years and took some fruit and kind of took a chance, so now they take care of me. They also have the same crew they’ve always had. I like to work with people that aren’t using seasonal crews. They use people that know the vineyard.”