2023 Sky Vineyards Grenache Rosé
“The 2023 Grenache Rosé Sky Vineyards is superb. Effusive and intensely aromatic, the 2023 conveys the essence of variety and site with notable class. Crushed rocks, flowers, cranberry, salt, orange peel and white pepper lend an exotic flair. Readers will find a Rosé with real depth, complexity and structure to match.” – 92 points, Antonio Galloni (Vinous)
We tried to act surprised when Caleb asked to make his own wine, but in reality, we’d been dreaming about sharing that experience with him for many years. The seed was planted in our minds, of course, by Morgan’s Vinos Bambino – wines he made at his own insistence as a young child for many years, with Joel’s loving blessing.
We’ve been bringing the kids to the winery since they were born, and I’m sure the winery is an enchanting place from such young eyes – who doesn’t loving spraying water around the cellar, riding on the forklift, sitting in the cab of the big flatbed, or eating grapes still cold to the touch and fresh off the vine?
As much as we’d hoped that Caleb (and Drew) might want to engage with the process more fully by making their own wines, we didn’t want to push our career onto our kids, and we wanted them to own the process by taking the initiative if they felt strongly enough to ask.
We had an answer ready when Caleb asked to make his own wine: he could choose the vineyard, but he’d have to come to the pick to help with harvest and say thank to you the grower and pickers, and he’d have to help in the winery. Caleb asked if he could do the cleaning jobs at the winery, not the dirty jobs (God bless our detail-oriented, organized, generally clean first-born…), and with that clarified he asked for fruit from “Sky Vineyard!”
I think I laughed out loud when he asked for fruit from Sky. Clearly he’d loved harvesting our 2022 Syrah together the previous year, but of all our vineyards, Sky fruit is especially allocated. Aside from our family, Lore had only ever sold fruit to two other wineries – Mayacamas in the late 1970s (where he’d worked as assistant winemaker prior to planting Sky) and Bedrock starting in 2016. Leave it to Cal to choose some of our best and dearest fruit to make his first wine from. It was a wise but unknowingly audacious choice.
Our 2023 Sky Vineyards Grenache Rosé was picked on September 6 from a small block of young vines that’s now known by the Olds family as “Caleb’s Block” (be still my heart…). As soon as we stopped picking, having run out of vines to pick, Caleb suddenly started to cry. I rushed over, thinking maybe he cut his finger with the snips he’d been using to harvest. It took a minute for him to get the words out, but he was crying because he was sad to stop picking grapes. He asked if we could keep picking. It was such a sweet moment, and really gets to the core of what makes harvest so precious and fleeting: we got one shot each year to make a wine that will grow and change with us as we both age, and that ephemeral gift is something to be treasured. Harvest comes but once a year.
With tears mopped up and thank you said, we trucked the grapes back to the winery ourselves and pressed it, with a bit of a foot tread, in Morgan’s original 1/3-ton hand cranked basket press. The old press is new again thanks to some particularly fine wrenching by Seph, our cellar master at Bedrock, and Josh, a mechanically handy intern from South Africa. The juice was racked to tank, cold-settled, and racked to a stainless-steel drum for fermentation. Contrary to our typical fermentation practices, we inoculated Caleb’s wine, mostly so I could show him what a yeast culture looks like and to explain what yeast are and what they do during fermentation. By the same token, we chose to make a rosé with Cal to explain just how it is that wines become red, white, pink, orange, or otherwise.
It likely goes without saying that we are beyond thrilled with this treasure of a wine. The wine is explosively aromatic, redolent of strawberries, white peaches, orange peel, and jasmine. The palate reveals the wisdom of Caleb’s choice of Sky Vineyards, as the wine carries the vineyard’s trademark acidity with vibrant, refreshing class, cutting through the notable concentration and fruit intensity.
2021 La Jolla del Norte Vineyard Riesling
“The 2021 No. 11 Crown Jewel is Riesling from the La Jolla del Norte Vineyard in St. Helena. Airy and weightless, the 2021 is full of citrus, white flowers, sage, mint and green pear notes. A whole range of savory and earthy inflections emerge with air. Bright acids give this understated, mid-weight Riesling tons of energy.” – 91 points, Antonio Galloni (Vinous)
It was a busy harvest morning at the winery in September of 2021 when I got the call that we all dream of: Tegan Passalacqua with the hot line on some particularly exciting fruit. Tegan has long worked with the Kirkham family that owns the Casa Nuestra vineyard and winery, and when he found out that there might be a little Riesling available for sale he very kindly suggested that we might be interested.
The pitch was intoxicating: half of seven rows of old-vine Riesling just east of the Silverado Trail in St. Helena, in soils that glitter black in the daylight from all the obsidian sprinkled throughout the vineyard. The vines were planted in 1961, according to Katrina Kirkham (or perhaps 1970), who with her husband Gene purchased the land from Captain John Thomas Blackburn in 1975. A planting date of 1961 places this as California’s third-oldest Riesling vineyard, behind just the venerable Stony Hill (1948) and hometown favorite Heinstein (1954).
Amazingly, these vines have been farmed organically by the Kirkham family since 1979. The Kirkhams write:
Throughout our four decades of stewardship of the land, preserving the property and protecting the water source from contaminates has always been our priority. The winery operation is an outgrowth of the farm and despite the many pressures to do otherwise, we have never changed our philosophy.
In 1979, almost two decades before national organic standards and certifying bodies existed, we committed to farm without using synthetic inputs. Revolutionary at the time, we refrained from using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. While most of our neighbors were controlling weeds using paraquat, an extremely powerful herbicide, we decided that we would manage weeds with cultivation practices in the vineyard, such as composting, planting cover crops, and tilling weeds back into the soil. Even the grape skins, stems and pulp from the winery are plowed back into the land.
We were the first in the Napa Valley to install solar panels in 2005. The Happy Farmer insisted that they were placed in a very prominent location so that everyone would see them and follow suit. Now solar energy powers all buildings on the estate, including the winery and the tasting room.
The morning of the pick I was feeling giddy and overwhelmingly grateful – never in my life did I imagine that we’d be buying fruit from Napa Valley, let along that love of my life Riesling. The fruit was whole-cluster pressed, settled in tank, and racked to two neutral barrels for fermentation. In the spring following harvest, the wine was racked to stainless steel drums to preserve freshness and tension. The resulting wine is beautifully aromatic, generously textured, and a glimpse into the past. Or, perhaps even a vision of what a more diverse Napa Valley might look like in the future.
2022 Massa Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon
“The 2022 Cabernet Sauvignon Massa Vineyard is an exotic, beautiful wine. Strong savory and floral overtones suggest some stem inclusion. There’s plenty of fruit, though, which is nicely pushed forward in this vintage. Succulent dark cherry, plum, pomegranate, cedar and sweet pipe tobacco lead into the racy, persistent finish.” – 92 points, Antonio Galloni (Vinous)
Massa Vineyard is a remarkable site – epic, and epically remote. The vineyard is set on the northern edge of Big Sur’s Ventana Wilderness; the road to the vineyard from the town of Carmel Valley is short, very steep, and absurdly twisty. Driving five tons of fruit out from the vineyard isn’t for the faint of heart (thank you, summer road construction job during college…). To the south of Massa Vineyard, there’s nothing but miles and miles of Bureau of Land Management land and the remote mountain peaks of interior Big Sur. To the north, the vineyard’s most conspicuous neighbor is the Jamesburg Earth Station, a now defunct but massive satellite dish that once relayed worldwide footage of the Apollo 11 moon landing. The satellite dish was built where it is, in the remote and wild Cachagua Valley, because radio interference is minimal – even radio signals have a hard time penetrating the valley.
Massa Vineyard was first planted in 1967 by Bill Durney; the vineyard was then known as Durney Vineyard. Cabernet Sauvignon was then the only variety planted at the vineyard, with cuttings supplied by Grandma Mirassou. The vineyard was the first vineyard planted in what is now known as the Carmel Valley AVA, and the wines from the vineyard enjoyed critical acclaim in the late 1970s and 1980s, even being poured for dinners at the White House during the Reagan administration.
The vineyard was purchased by the Heller family in 1993, following Bill Durney’s death. The Hellers re-named the vineyard Heller Estate and converted to organic viticultural practices – the vines have been farmed without the use of herbicides for nearly thirty years. The vineyard was sold again in 2018, purchased by Bill Massa, and re-named Massa Vineyard.
The vines at Massa Vineyard sit directly on the Cachagua Fault and are rooted in an unusual mix of granitic and metasedimentary rocks. I say unusual because granitic soils in California vineyards are relatively rare. While the granitic plutons that form the core of the Sierra Nevada are famous, there isn’t much granite to speak of in most Sierra Foothills vineyards, and none at all in the North Bay. The granodiorite and quartz monzonite that underlay Massa Vineyard come from the southern Sierra Nevada, thanks to the transform faulting action of the San Andreas Fault and the displacement of the Salinian Block.
There are so many pieces of the puzzle that make Massa Vineyard such a singular place and that help explain why the wines from there are so utterly unique: old vines planted on their own roots in granitic soils; its cool mountainside location deep in the wilds of California’s Central Coast; thirty years of organic farming. Everything about Massa screams UNICORN. And most importantly, the vineyard speaks with a clear and beautifully resonant voice through its wines.
Our Massa Vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon comes from Block 13, which is one of just a few remaining blocks of the original own-rooted 1971 planting with Mirassou budwood. Fermentation was by native yeasts after destemming and crushing, and maceration lasted for almost four weeks in tank before draining and pressing. The wine was raised in three 225-liter barrels for fifteen months with one racking, including 33% new oak from a medium-plus toast Taransaud barrel. The nose soars from the glass in the way that only cool-climate mountain Cabernet can: cherry, raspberry, pomegranate, pink peppercorn, rose petals, and cedar all sing in fresh, nuanced harmony. On the palate, terrific fruit concentration at modest scale with supple fine-grained tannins and a sappy finish point to the benefits of own-rooted vines, where possible. This wine is a true gem from one of the rare historic Cabernet vineyards left in California.
