"This is another stellar collection of wines from Cody and Emily Rasmussen.
The Rieslings are once again standouts, as is the Syrah from Shake Ridge.
Readers will find nuanced, highly expressive wines that capture the essence of site, variety and vintage.”
– ANTONIO GALLONI, JULY 2021
I (Emily) was reading through Cody’s tasting notes for this release and couldn’t help but think about how well the name “desire lines” captures our winemaking philosophy—or specifically, our vineyard-sourcing philosophy. We weren’t trying for this much metaphor when we named our wines, but as we continue this adventure, the concept of a path forged off the main trail keeps cropping up in our lives.
For example, did we as teenagers think we’d be living in Sonoma, California, raising our children and golden retrievers in the shadow of the Mayacamas, riding forklifts and running through the vineyard for their entertainment? No way. Then, when we started Desire Lines, did we think we’d be releasing MULTIPLE vineyard-designate Rieslings? Nope! Did we think we would ever let Emily start a release letter with a series of rhetorical questions? ABSOLUTLEY NOT. But here we are. As the inspirational poster hung in my childhood bedroom says, “life is about the journey, not the destination.” Here, my destination is to get you to Cody’s loquacious tasting notes, but first, some thoughts on the lineup as a whole: looking at these wines makes me think about how exciting it is that Cody continues to find us new vineyards, journeying (mentally and physically) around California to find sites that captivate us and make beautiful wines. We go where our path takes us, whether a several-hour drive south to Santa Barbara or a 10-minute drive to Bedrock, the vineyard that feels like home. From returning favorites like Griffin’s Lair to new discoveries, we’re beyond thrilled about these wines and can’t wait to share them with you.
Once again, we’re delighted to share tasting notes for this release illustrated by none other than @freshcutgardenhose – James Beard Award-winning artist and sommelier Maryse Chevriere. Her work is wonderfully goofy, charming, and incisive (like Shel Silverstein with a wine-soaked pen nib) and we couldn’t be more grateful for her work here.
Sending so much love and gratitude to you all!
Emily, Cody, Cal, Drew, Kinley & Maya
2020 WINDS OF CHANGE RED WINE, CALIFORNIA
Though this is only the second iteration of our Syrah-based red blend entitled Winds of Change, it has quickly become a favorite of our family (I’m looking at you Emily…) and friends. It’s a pleasure to make and an absolute joy to drink. The wine is, quite simply, Desire Lines – our whole journey – captured in one bottle. The wine is our ode to California’s cool and windy places, where some of our favorite varieties take on new life—Syrah becomes lithe and perfumed, Carignan becomes vibrant and rich, and Mourvèdre smells like a strawberry pie cooling on the windowsill on a sultry summer night.
With the challenges that the North Coast faced in 2020 regarding smoke exposure, and the uncertainty at the time as to how the wines would turn out, we were lucky to be able to focus our efforts for this wine in particular on Contra Costa and Santa Barbara counties. Our fruit was picked from Contra Costa prior to the outbreak of the LNU Complex Fire on the morning of August 17th, and Santa Barbara was far enough south to be spared any significant smoke exposure. (With all that said, while it was a traumatic harvest under adverse circumstances, there are far too many lovely wines from 2020 to paint over the entire vintage with a single sooty brushstroke.)
It’s been fascinating to get to know the vineyards of Santa Barbara more intimately (shoutout to Thompson Vineyard in particular for this wine) and I’m excited by the way the freshness, concentration, and fruit-forward nature of those wines marries to the slightly more stern architecture and savory character of our North Coast vineyards.
We’ve lovingly referred to this as our “back the truck up” wine. I have no doubt that this wine will benefit from time in bottle as well, just like its vineyard-designate brethren, but all the same the wine is built to be more immediately user-friendly. As we say on the back label: may this wine be a wind of change for these underrated varieties that we love so much!
2020 WILEY VINEYARD RIESLING, ANDERSON VALLEY
We’re thrilled to introduce a second vineyard-designate California Riesling for Desire Lines. Hailing from the wilds of Mendocino County: Wiley Vineyard, in the Deep End of Anderson Valley. We first worked with the fruit from Wiley Vineyard in 2019, and bottled the wine under our Experimental Series, because it was too good not to. With vineyard illustration now in hand, the wine will be joining our regular cast of characters, we hope as a long-time stalwart.
Wiley Vineyard was one of the first few vineyards to be planted in Anderson Valley following the repeal of Prohibition, with a block of Riesling planted in 1976 on a ridgeline above the valley floor, encircled by redwoods and Douglas fir trees. Since then, Wiley has gained prestigious neighbors – Bearwallow and Kiser vineyards are just across the highway, and Wendling Vineyard is on the other side of the ridge.
Wiley Vineyard is colder than Cole Ranch with a prominent marine influence from the nearby Pacific Ocean, giving a wine that’s relatively more taught and laser-focused. Because the two wines are made so similarly (whole cluster pressing with cold settling in tank, followed by fermentation in neutral barrels, where the wines are left on fine lees until bottling in the summer) the difference between the wines is simply vineyard expression. While Cole Ranch is extravagantly perfumed and exotic in the glass with a bracing tension and viscousness on the palate, Wiley is pure and lean on the palate (7 g/L RS) and characterized by lemon citrus, beguiling florals, resinous herbs, and a slight brackishness on the nose. In other words, it tastes just as it should – like Riesling from a cold, maritime vineyard at the edge of ripening in the Deep End of Anderson Valley.
In 2020, we installed weather station data loggers at Wiley Vineyard and Cole Ranch, to better illustrate the differences between the two sites. Notice that Cole Ranch has higher daytime highs but also lower nighttime lows than Wiley Vineyard - the definition of a continental site. The temperature at Wiley Vineyard is moderated, both during the day and at night, by the close proximity of the Pacific Ocean. Wiley also tends to get blasted by the incoming marine layer more regularly than Cole Ranch, which you can see in the relative humidity curve a couple of times.
2020 EXPERIMENTAL SERIES NO. 9: CAT CANYON VINEYARD CHENIN BLANC,
SANTA BARBARA COUNTY
Cat Canyon was a vineyard that I first discovered (of all places…) on Instagram. A friend posted a picture of a scruffy old Chenin Blanc vineyard and I was hooked. Own-rooted Chenin Blanc in a chilly little canyon just outside Los Alamos, planted in the 1970s in sand and calcareous shale? Yes please. Never mind the five hour drive, one way, to check out the vineyard and sample fruit during the peak of harvest…
Being our first foray into white wine from Santa Barbara County, this was both a challenging and exciting wine to make. The juice pressed out beautifully fresh and crisp, and after a short cold settle in tank was put down to barrel for fermentation (a combination of second- and third-fill Stockinger 228L barrels, neutral 300L puncheons, and neutral 320L cigare-shaped puncheons).
Amazingly, the fermentation was quickly dominated by stern, flinty reduction. Sensing both an imperative and an opportunity, we switched course a bit and began thinking of the wine less as a Chenin-analog and more as a White Burg-facsimilie. I adore drinking White Burgundy (who doesn’t, really?) but have rarely had the opportunity to work a ferment in a way to balance the fruit and flesh of the wine with the bracing tension and savory flavors imparted by sulfides (the good ones) and reduction. The wines were racked with fine lees and returned to barrel in the early spring, and racked again to stainless steel drums in August for further tensioning, before being bottled in January – it was our longest élevage for a white wine to date.
Ultimately, we ended up bottling just three of eight barrels, and the resulting wine is absolutely fascinating – you can practically smell the brackish, salty sea breeze blowing in off the coast, landing gently on juicy green apples and salted lemon rinds. My favorite Chenin Blancs are those made from the hill of Breze by the likes of Thierry Germain, Romain Guiberteau, and Brendan Stater-West, and this wine certainly speaks with the same vocabulary.
2019 EXPERIMENTAL SERIES NO. 5: BEDROCK VINEYARD MOURVÈDRE,
SONOMA VALLEY
With apologies to all our other wonderful vineyards (we love you all, really!), Bedrock Vineyard is undoubtably the most important vineyard in our family’s life – owned and farmed by some of our closest friends; the site of epic yearly late-night harvest parties; the pond where Maya first learned to swim; and the vineyard where our boys will both learn to prune their first vine. The vineyard is only a few miles north of our home in Sonoma, so it isn’t unusual for us to find ourselves wandering the old vine blocks on a weekend day when the boys and/or dogs need to get the wiggles out.
My favorite blocks at Bedrock Vineyard are the two small blocks of old-vine Mourvèdre, planted on a rocky, north-facing knoll that runs gently down to Hooker Creek to the north. Even within the grandeur that is Bedrock Vineyard, there’s something about those two little blocks that have an extra little bit of magic for me. Here the tree line along Hooker Creek creeps just a little closer to the vineyard, close enough that you can hear the rushing water in the winter, casting a cooling shadow along the periphery road in the summer, where hawks roost in the branches overhead. Or maybe it’s just because the block is usually the turnaround point in our family walk, and where I’ve been trying to teach Caleb that you can pick out Mourvèdre by its upright growth habit and downy-white shoot tips.
Our 2019 Bedrock Vineyard Mourvèdre was fermented with 40% whole cluster and raised in barrel for fifteen months without racking, in a combination of 228L and 600L barrels. The stem inclusion adds a lovely bit of spice to the nose, the subtle carbonic adds a little flesh to the palate, and the combination of barrel sizes teases out both breadth and tension in the finished wine. Befitting Bedrock Vineyard, this is a powerful wine, perhaps the richest wine that we’ve made to date for Desire Lines. For so many reasons, this was an especially satisfying wine for us to bottle, and we’re very grateful for the privilege and the opportunity to have worked with Bedrock Vineyard.
2019 GRIFFIN’S LAIR SYRAH, PETALUMA GAP AVA
This is a bittersweet wine for us to release because it will unfortunately be the last Griffin’s Lair Syrah for us for a while – the 2020 won’t be bottled due to smoke taint, and the 2021 fruit was dropped on the ground early in the growing season for the sake of vine health during the drought. The 2019 vintage, with its unusual late spring rains that led to generous crops across much of the North Bay, was good for the soul (of the vines) at Griffin’s Lair – the wine retains its olive brine-y character but is imbued with a little more pliancy than usual.
Griffin’s Lair continues to amaze me by the way it bears the imprint of the vintage so clearly – we do practically the exact same thing in the winery each year, and yet the wine has a personality all its own year after year. As always, the wine was handled exactly the same as previous vintage: the wine 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 wine tastes unmistakably like Griffin’s Lair, suffused with cherry, black tea, and bacon fat, all of which are cast in high relief by the cap submersion.
Griffin’s Lair captivated our hearts from our early days in Sonoma, and getting to make wines from this amazing site has been a gift and honor. With that said, we’re closing out the release letter with some of Cody’s juicy deep-dive content that he wrote for our website.
The 2019 Syrah Griffin's Lair Vineyard is polished in its first impression, before all of that Syrah fruit and tannin hit the palate. Cedar, tobacco and spice lift a core of bright red-toned fruit. This mid-weight Syrah will almost certainly blossom with more time in bottle.
– 93 points (Antonio Galloni, Vinous)
HISTORY
From the top of the hill at Griffin’s Lair, you can see the full sweep of the Petaluma River estuary – from the port city of Petaluma down to San Pablo Bay – and, on a clear day, even to the skyline of the city clear across San Francisco Bay. Though the river looks placid now as it rolls by the forgotten hamlet of Lakeville (bisected twice daily by breakneck commuter traffic; previously served by a stagecoach route to Sonoma), the late 1800s would have shown a far different landscape: draft steamers travelling the river, ferrying wine and building materials from the busy docks at Petaluma, and passengers to the landing at Donahue, which was the southern terminus of the San Francisco and North Pacific Railroad that served Santa Rosa.
William Bihler was the first to plant grapevines in the Lakeville area of the Petaluma Gap, with 100 acres planted in 1874 on the hillsides above the Petaluma River, one-half mile below Donahue (and less than a mile from Griffin’s Lair). Bihler sold his wine in bulk, except for a small amount of estate-bottled wine, which bore the label Mt. Vernon, in honor of the New York suburb where he once lived. He quickly achieved recognition for his vineyard. In the First Annual Report of the Board of State Viticultural Commissioners in 1881, Isaac De Turk – the commissioner for the Sonoma District and owner of two large wineries, one in Santa Rosa and one in Bennett Valley – singled out Bihler’s plantings exclusively, writing:
A very interesting and successful experiment of William Bihler in lower Petaluma Valley, below Donahue Landing, has conclusively proven that the vine flourishes on the level with tidewater as well as upon the red volcanic soil of the interior up-lands.
In 1891, U.S. Senator James G. Fair (made rich by his stake in the Comstock Lode) purchased all 9,140 acres of Bihler’s ranch, including the vineyards and winery, by which time the Bihler winery had storage space for 600,000 gallons of wine, all in redwood cooperage. That size would have made the winery possibly the largest in Sonoma County, and one of the largest in the state. In a short time the Lakeville region had grown rapidly; by 1891, there were nine growers with a total of 320 acres planted to grapevines. The Lakeville region of the Petaluma Gap was recognized early-on as among the best growing regions in the county – “Some of the finest vineyards in Sonoma County are near Lakeville” (Sonoma Democrat, July 1886) – for reasons we can imagine are no different than today.
CLIMATE
The climate of Griffin’s Lair is defined by the daily onrush of cold winds that sweep through the Petaluma Valley, limiting vigor and slowing photosynthesis. There is on the Sonoma coast, between Tomales Bay and Bodega Bay, a gap in the coastal range: within this 18-mile stretch of coastline, no barrier higher than 600 feet exists, while ridgelines to the north and south rise to over 1000 feet. As the sun heats inland California over the course of the morning, a pressure differential develops between the cold, dense air sitting over water just off the coast, and the increasingly warm, less-dense air over land. By noon, the difference in air pressure is great enough to suck the cold air inland, through the Petaluma Gap and all 33 miles to San Pablo Bay by way of Petaluma Valley.
Griffin’s Lair bears the full brunt of this chilly diurnal cycle, perched on a northwest-facing hillside above the Petaluma River. This marine influence moderates the afternoon temperatures of the Petaluma 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. In other words, vines respond to windy conditions with a long nap, much like a certain Golden Retriever in our lives on gray, rainy days…
SOIL
Griffin’s Lair sits at the foot of Sonoma Mountain, a formation cleaved by three active fault zones: the Tolay Fault, the Roche-Cardoza Fault, and the venerable Rodgers Creek Fault. The soils belong to the Haire series of gravelly loams, alluvially deposited into rocky fans and terraces, which drain freely. The gravel content of the soil ranges between 10% and 25%, based on soil pits; the composition of the gravels is a jumbled mix of rocks – Sonoma volcanics, Franciscan Complex schists, and Great Valley Sequence sandstones – carried from near and far by various faults.
Geologically, Griffin’s Lair sits over the Petaluma Formation, which consists of mudstones and sandstones deposited as alluvial sediment between four and eight million years ago into an estuary at the western edge of the North American continent. Fossils found therein include both saltwater and freshwater species, as well as terrestrial vertebrates, suggesting that the vineyard would have once been home to a freshwater river delta flowing into saltwater tidal flats, and the sea. The size, shape, and orientation of the grain found within the mudstones and sandstones indicate that the sediment would have been deposited in a west-flowing, slow-moving fluvial environment, near sea level – imagine the estuaries of the San Pablo Bay, but rotated instead to front the Pacific Ocean directly.
Curiously (or not, depending on your feelings about geological minutia…), one of the rocks found within the Petaluma Formation – a Briones sandstone clast riddled with quartz veins – originates, not locally, but from the Diablo Mountains south of San Jose. Considering this, it’s likely that the marine basin that captured the sediments of the Petaluma Formation lay farther south than it is today. After deposition, the basin was fragmented by plate tectonics and carried north, in some fashion, along the Hayward-Rodgers Creek Fault. Add this migratory sandstone to the list of wildly out-of-place rocks in California, thanks to the transform motion of the San Andreas fault zone – granite from the Sierra Nevada carried to Big Sur and Point Reyes, and a sandstone that crossed San Pablo Bay.