This wine opens with cantaloupe and honeydew. The nose is floral and pretty with wafts of kumquat, saffron and ginger. It is fleshy, weighty, wintery. It shows wild fennel, lemon custard and almond tarts on the palate. This is a welcoming wine, with layers of finesse and tannin.
This fruit enjoyed about 12 hours of unintentional skin contact. It was pressed off, fermented naturally, and aged in neutral French oak for 10 months with no stirring but extended lees contact. Adam used a light pad filter for clarity. It was not fined, so vegan. 52 cases produced.
2021 Perch Sauvignon Blanc
$28.00
“The Sauvignon Blanc is from a vineyard in the Fiddletown AVA in Amador County called Oleta. Oleta was the original name of Fiddletown. It’s currently owned by Jim Riskas. I heard they had some really excellent Sauvignon Blanc there. I started sampling and the fruit tasted amazing. The wine that I always had in my mind, which I know is a lofty goal, is the I block from Mondavi. It’s a serious wine that ages.
This wine is singular in so many ways. For example, the ripeness. I was hoping for 22 Brix and it came in at 24. It was made at a winery that was also fermenting Sherry wine in the cellar. I would say it didn’t have skin contact, but skin contact is a spectrum. This fruit was extremely juicy, and was picked at six o’clock in the morning. I didn’t process the fruit until seven o’clock at night. I was the redheaded stepchild in the winery. My fruit sits all the way in the back and presses last.
Okay, so that’s skin contact. It just wasn’t on purpose. Let’s not bullshit. Sometimes the way a wine turns out is not a product of your winemaking. It’s a product of how the day went. Nobody talks about that. They just want to romanticize. I don’t mind talking about it.
When you talk about terroir, when you talk about the vintage report, people say here’s how much rain we got and here’s how many days of 100 degree weather we had. Here’s the fire and here’s all these weather things. They don’t talk about the fact that, hey, my grandma passed away and I had to buck and leave the winery and we didn’t didn’t get to this thing for a while. I always think that that’s part of what makes wine is that we’re humans and our lives are not always perfectly aligned with the way we want to make the wine every year. It 100% affects how the wine tastes, and sometimes it makes the wine better, or more interesting. It’s not a negative thing. So that’s how that went down. I love this wine.”