Before Caleb was born, we got lots of advice from friends and family (and random people on the street, but that's not important right now). A couple things we heard most often were a) that our lives were going to change, and b) we were about to get way more efficient in our time-management skills. Both proved to be true. Particularly for me (Emily), working from home most days during Caleb’s naptimes and post-bedtime, I find myself in frenzied spurts of coffee-fueled productivity. On one such afternoon a few months ago, I found myself completely rewriting the About Us page on our website. "I need to explain what on earth a desire line is!" I realized. "I need to clarify what the throughline is that ties our wines together!"
I made some progress by the time Cal woke up from his nap:
"A desire line is a path made by the one walking it. It’s often a path that diverts from the main trail, whether through an empty field to get from one street to another or a straight line up a mountain made by someone too impatient for switchbacks."
When we were searching for a name for our wines, "desire lines" fit for a few reasons: the metaphorical “desire line” of our path from Iowa to California; the literal trail adventures of my relentlessly active husband; and the seemingly meandering paths from one of our vineyard sources to the next.
Which brings us to the second part of my wine brand identity crisis: identifying the themes that string our wines together. We currently make five single-vineyard wines along with a few experimental wines. The vineyards span 400+ miles across California, four different AVAs in four different counties, five different varieties. Desire Lines has given us an amazing opportunity: to make wines from places that are thoroughly and captivatingly unique.
In this release we have the latest rendition of our Cole Ranch Riesling and Griffin’s Lair Syrah along with a Cabernet Sauvignon (!) from the beautiful Lichau Hill Vineyard. We’re continually grateful that our path has taken us to these inspiring places and that we get to make wines from them.
Lots more below about these three wines, which we are so excited to share with you all. Thank you so much as always for your support!
Emily, Cody & Caleb
2018 COLE RANCH RIESLING, MENDOCINO COUNTY
Like usual, Cole Ranch was among the last fruit to be picked in 2018, and by the time the calendar turned to October we already had a feeling that 2018 would be a special vintage. The wines coming out of tank were so beautifully knit, with crazy perfume, vibrant colors, and deliciousness turned to 11. Blending the 2018s before bottling felt like that scene in every space movie when everybody in Mission Control screams and high-fives because the launch went smoothly. It was a good vintage to be a winemaker.
Cole Ranch is but a blip on the map of Mendocino County – at just 189 acres in total, with less than 50 acres planted, it is the smallest American Viticultural Area (AVA) in the country, and the only AVA with just a single vineyard. In this sense it is, like Coulée de Serrant and Château-Grillet in France, a very singular terroir. The vines were planted at Cole Ranch in 1973, making it the fifth-oldest Riesling vineyard in the state. The vineyard sits in a narrow valley in the mountains between Boonville and Ukiah. The valley benefits from the cooling maritime influence of nearby Anderson Valley, and yet has a large diurnal and seasonal range of temperatures like inland Mendocino County. It snows in Cole Ranch once or twice a winter, and by October the nights are freezing cold. I (Cody) always find myself riding the picking bins in the morning, in thermal tights under a pair of wool jeans, praying for the sun to crest the ridge and warm me up while thanking our lucky stars that John Cole thought to plant Riesling in his valley so many years ago.
The 2018 Cole Ranch Riesling was whole-cluster pressed to tank, where the juice was cold settled for 48 hours before being racked to neutral wood barrels for fermentation. For whatever reason, Cole Ranch has always been a slow fermenter, and 2018 proved to be no different – I got only two of the four barrels sulfured before Christmas, while the other two barrels didn’t finish primary fermentation until late January. The 2018 is beautifully fragrant, with a dizzying array of aromas: white flowers, lime zest, peach, mango, and fresh ginger. And, like the German Grosses Gewächs Rieslings that we love so much, the wine is a study in tension and richness, with a few grams of residual sugar retained to balance the abundant acidity.
2017 GRIFFIN'S LAIR SYRAH, PETALUMA GAP
Our Griffin’s Lair Syrah always has a magic to it, capturing the chilly Petaluma Gap site and the wonderful folks who tend to the property. 2017 was a transition vintage on that front, marking the last vintage Joan and Jim Griffin owned the vineyard before handing off to a wonderful new family in the spring of 2018. We miss Jim Griffin, who passed away in the fall of 2018, so very much. We hope to honor his legacy in the wines we continue to make that bear his name.
The vines at Griffin’s Lair are planted on a north-facing hillside in the very throat of the Petaluma Gap. The vineyard bears the full brunt of the chilly winds that rip through the Gap – as the Central Valley warms each morning, the resulting convective uplift sucks cold marine air inland from the Sonoma Coast, in through a gap in the coast range and along the Petaluma River to San Pablo Bay. This marine influence moderates the afternoon temperatures of the Petaluma River valley, delivering cool air when temperatures would otherwise be at their highest. The vines are regularly buffeted by winds strong enough to limit leaf stomatal conductance, which delays sugar ripening by shutting down photosynthesis, often for hours at a time each day. Portions of the Petaluma Gap are effectively the coldest parts of the vast Sonoma Coast AVA.
Like previous vintages, the 2017 fermented un-inoculated with 50% whole cluster and a submerged cap through the first half of fermentation, pressed off just short of dryness, and put down to neutral large format barrels for 15 months before bottling. The resulting wine is lovely; our most ethereal Griffin’s Lair to date, suffused with cherry, black tea, and bacon fat, all of which are cast in high relief by the cap submersion. The wine is a touch softer on the palate than previous vintages, with a silky texture and rich yet delicate mouthfeel. It’s in a great place right now, seeming like the friendliest young Griffin’s Lair we’ve made yet.
2018 LICHAU HILL CABERNET SAUVIGNON, PETALUMA GAP
Funnily enough, in the course of my wine studies, I made it all the way to the Master of Wine program before I realized that I really, really like Cabernet Sauvignon. I’ve long had a soft spot for the immediate delights of Loire Valley Cab Franc, but Left Bank Bordeaux was harder for me to understand in its youth. I had to drink the wines backwards - older to younger - to understand what happens to Cab’s youthful nervous energy on the palate, how seamlessly the oak can integrate, and how beautifully floral and fresh the variety’s innately green personality can become with age.
We didn’t intend to make a Cabernet when we started Desire Lines. But, like a desire line along a hiking trail, the path to Lichau Hill appeared for us in 2018, so we happily followed it up Sonoma Mountain. The vineyard is thoroughly singular, the only Cabernet Sauvignon planted in the Petaluma Gap AVA. How then can Cabernet Sauvignon fully ripen, you ask? It’s all thanks to Lichau Hill’s elevation, situated inland and far enough above the fog line to reliably ripen Cabernet, even if it may take until late October to reach just 24° brix.
Planted in 1999 in soil so rocky that a wall was built around our block from the rocks excavated during planting, Lichau Hill (Lichau pronounced "lee-how") sits high up on a south-west facing ridge, looking down at Gap’s Crown Vineyard below and the rest of the Petaluma Gap splayed out into the distance, all the way to the Pacific Ocean. We were drawn to Lichau Hill because it has all the markers of a great mountain Cabernet site, with a cooler coastal climate.
Our 2018 Lichau Hill Cabernet Sauvignon was fully destemmed but not crushed, fermented and left on skins for thirty days in tank, and aged for 15 months in 225L barriques with 40% new oak included. The wine has a silky mouthfeel with vibrant acidity and a distinctly red-fruited profile, with pretty notes of red currant, red apple skin, rose petals and graphite.
