This wine is key lime pie with the good salt crumbles on top. It leads with beeswax, peaches, green apple, kiwi, lychee, and passionfruit. The palate has a core of minerality and graphite running through it. This wine is like walking into an Asian market and saying yes please!
This wine was whole cluster pressed and fermented cold, progressing to its natural finishing point. It was aged for 5 months in 50% neutral French oak and 50% stainless steel barrels. No malolactic fermentation (secondary) was allowed to occur. This wine is unfined and crossflow filtered, so vegan. 263 cases produced.
2021 Terratorium Riesling
$28.00
“I definitely pushed for the Riesling. Riesling has this baggage around it, people think they don’t like it. We had to find the right vineyard, which can be hard. Jim was able to get a lead on Tondré Grapefield Vineyard. We had a couple conversations with Joe Alarid, who’s the farmer and owner down there, and we fell in love with the property. They call it Grapefield because they farm so many other things (even though grapes have now become their main focus), they would say to his grandfather, well, time to go check out the grape field. It wasn’t a vineyard. So that stuck, and that’s now the name of the site. The Riesling is incredible, it’s cool climate that never got above 75 degrees in ‘21. It’s 10 miles from the coast, with constant fog and wind influence. It’s right on that benchtop plateau of the St. Lucia Highlands and you’ve got the Pacific air blowing through. If we were going to find a California Riesling site, I couldn’t design a better one.
Joe gave us a tonnage target we had to hit. It was frankly more than we had thought we would want, but we didn’t want to miss out on the fruit, so we jumped at it.”