2017 EVANGELHO VINEYARD RED WINE, CONTRA COSTA COUNTY
When I (Cody) first started working at Bedrock, one of my first jobs was to create a binder with maps of all the Bedrock vineyards. I remember, as I scrolled through Morgan’s list of cool vineyards in Google Earth, a sense of shock at the number of vineyards in Contra Costa County that he’d bookmarked. Where was that?! I couldn’t remember ever seeing that region in The Wine Atlas. But, because of Morgan and Chris’s enthusiasm for Contra Costa’s sandy soils and their insistence that we understand each individual vineyard, I began to recognize (as they had) the beauty of Contra Costa County.
The vines at Evangelho are own-rooted, planted in the 1890s in pure sand and buffeted by the winds that blow through the Carquinez Strait and across the Delta. Though the vineyard rarely sees the cool and foggy marine layer, the constant winds alter the vines’ respiratory rates, producing grapes with wonderfully low pHs and fresh, vibrant flavors.
Our 2017 Evangelho Red Wine is a blend of roughly 95% carignan and 5% mourvèdre. The wine was fermented with 30% whole cluster under a submerged cap and aged for ten months in neutral 400L barrels. The carignan from Evangelho gives a juicy wine that smells of flowers and red fruits, with a soft tannin profile (a product of the sandy soils) and vibrant acidity. The inclusion of whole cluster adds spice to the nose, while the small portion of carbonic maceration and mourvèdre add flesh to the palate. The winemaking style is inspired by our love for the great cru Beaujolais of France (and in our book, that’s Clos de la Roilette’s Cuvée Tardive and the old-vine single parcels of Château Thivin): wines that are a joy to drink while young and age gracefully as well.
2016 SHAKE RIDGE RANCH SYRAH, AMADOR COUNTY
We were introduced to Shake Ridge Ranch in Amador County by a dear friend, and to this day our time spent at the ranch is one of our greatest joys. Ann Kraemer is a terrific viticulturalist, and she and her whole family have become like family to us.
I don’t know of any other vineyard where the same folks get up at 3AM for the night pick, offer to make lattes for anybody trucking fruit from the vineyard in the morning, catch up on paperwork before lunch, go out to pull bird nets off for the following night’s pick in the afternoon, and then host dinner and make sure that everyone has a bunk before bedding down themselves.
The viticultural work is perfection, and the vines are planted in a mind-bending mix of soils. It’s an inspiring place to make wine from, in every aspect, and we’re very fortunate to work with the syrah from Shake Ridge.
Our 2016 Shake Ridge Syrah was fermented with 50% whole cluster and aged for 14 months in neutral 500L barrels. We get fruit from two different blocks on the front of the ranch, from the first vines planted at Shake Ridge in 2003. Both blocks run from the crown of a ridge down into the colder swale, giving us a range of flavors to work with – textbook Syrah game and funk from the top, acid and fresh blue fruit flavors from the bottom. The wine is exotically perfumed with firm tannin and a sweet core of fruit that runs through the center of the wine, fitting for a wine from the foothills (that’s spelled “piedmont” in Italian…).
And in conclusion: Some winemaking ponderings brought to you by Cody
When we first started making our own wines in 2015, I told myself that we’d hew to the center, that we’d endeavor to make wines in the mold of the Old World that spoke of the untold and untapped possibilities of the New World. Wines that were, in some way, historical and traditional; that shared in common production methods and guiding philosophies with wineries (mostly in France, I’ll admit) that I particularly admire. You might call it going back to our roots as a California winery, with attendant alcohol levels to match. For proof of our ambition, look no further than the front label of each of our wines, all of which feature the vineyard name front and center and relegate our brand name to a corner of the label. The illustration in the center of the label is a drawing of each vineyard, done by hand in pen and ink by a wonderfully talented artist and dear friend, Adam Stoner. The style of our labels was meant to evoke the old turn-of-the-century California wine labels that I adore, which are caught in that Late-Victorian/Art Nouveau space that mediated the increasingly industrialized existence of modernity.
I thought that we’d find a firm foundation in traditional practices, unshakable and unmoving.
But, it takes only a little probing to reduce claims of absolute historicity – a straw man – to a pile of chafe. During the Middle Ages, the wines from Champagne were highly regarded and were still rather than sparkling. There existed a bitter rivalry between Burgundy and Champagne for the attention of the French monarchs. Today, we know the terroirs of Champagne instead through a bubbly lens. Les Clos and Montée de Tonerre in Chablis were both at one time known for the quality of their sparkling wines, not the still wines that we revere today. In Germany, prior to the wide-scale adoption of sterile filtration in the 1960s, it was a rare Riesling that was sweeter than off-dry but less sweet than the dessert wines concentrated by botrytis and freezing temperatures – how could one stabilize them in bottle? Today, many of the greatest producers in the Mosel make wines in the Prädikat categories – Kabinett, Auslese, and Spätlese – that may have been historically anomalous but are now part of the German wine canon. And in Napa, how do we understand Cabernet Sauvignon? The favorite variety of H.W. Crabb (who first planted To-Kalon vineyard) was likely Mondeuse, which he called Crabb’s Black Burgundy. Petite Sirah played an important role in the long-lived Burgundy-style wines of the 1920s and 1930s, while in the 1960s Chenin Blanc, Green Hungarian and others were widely planted. “Traditional” is a moving target.
On the other hand, to say that a wine is a truly unique creation – that it can be understood within no existing paradigm; that it lacks reference points, even siblings, as a way of understanding it more deeply – is for me a sad thing. I find joy in wines that speak clearly of their birthplace: a terroir and a vintage in the hands of a farmer and a winemaker. How lovely would it be if wines, like dogs, mysteriously shared a personality with their winemaker in some way? Wines become intellectually challenging and rewarding when one variable is held constant, allowing the other variables to be revealed more clearly – the same grape on different soils or different grapes on the same soils, or yet again the same wine aged differently, or the same grape and terroir made still and sparkling.
Where does that leave us? With a hope and vision to make wines that are indelibly ours—but that are also a product of a time, a place, and production methods that enable connections with other wines. I can think of no greater compliment than that our wines might grace your table and facilitate conversation and connection by their presence. We hope that you enjoy them!
Love,
Cody & Emily