We are excited to present the wines for the Spring club offering. We are featuring the 2022 vintage Pinot Noirs, which was a season fraught with challenges including a very late spring, April frost and harvest that started in October. At one point, we thought we were facing a very small production (under a few thousand cases), but nature has a way of bouncing back. Although we lost almost all the Pinot Noir from our Estate Vineyard due to other circumstances, our other sources of Pinot Noir delivered! We even collaborated with a California winery, Rhys Winery, to purchase fruit from the Anderson Valley in Navarro, CA called Bearwallow Vineyard. See below for more details.
To customize your order, please select from the wines listed below. If you prefer to receive the club exclusive wines, you do not need to make any changes. They appear in the top three rows with two bottles of each wine designated. Currently, we are only offering the three club selections from the 2022 vintage, and the customizable wines are from the 2021 vintage. As we move through the year, we will be releasing the others.
The pricing reflects 20% discount off retail prices. If you increase to two cases, the discount is 25% off retail prices. The discount is applied at the time we process the order and flat rate shipping applies. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to shipping these to you in the coming weeks. Please note, once the order is charged, we are not able to make changes. Please review your address and wine selections carefully. Thank you!
Regarding Bearwallow Vineyard, Jim Anderson has a lot to say about this situation, but I will save that for the club letter. In the meantime, here is a quick overview of why we ventured down this path. From Jim’s notes:
This wine’s existence has a few factors to it that make it one of the most unique bottlings we have every produced. The April frosts in 2022 seemed devastating at the time they occurred. Best guesses, even by the most experienced vineyard managers, were overall losses of 50-90% depending on site location. In short, things looked incredibly grim and just one year removed from the 80+% losses incurred by the 2020 wildfires the outlook was frightening. I contacted Kevin Harvey since I sort of knew him and I was aware that Rhys Winery had been on an aggressive vineyard development campaign over the past 15 years and thought it might be possible they had some fruit available.
Rhys Winery doesn’t sell much fruit. The only other non-Rhys customer of Bearwallow Vineyard fruit is Rivers-Marie Winery. So, this is a rare wine that only happened because another winery was trusting of us to represent their vineyard well, apparently as curious to see what we could do as we were and just happened to have a little more than their current plans called for. This project could have much more easily never gotten off the ground than coming to full fruition.
The nature of this area is to produce wines with bracing fruit underpinned by a distinctly mineral character in the finish and fine, strong tannins that belie the high-toned nature of the fruit. That is what this wine does in spades. The fruit is on the reddest of the red fruited spectrum (almost in a Sour Patch Kids sort of way except not candied or confectioned) that is expansive throughout the mid-palate. This leads into the finish of stone, quartz and a mélange of dried berries ranging from raspberries to blueberries. It is a gorgeous and elegant wine that has a resolute backbone to it. This is a wine that will assuredly last past the two decades that the 2002 Hirsch Vineyard Pinot Noir (this was our first collaboration with a California Vineyard) bottling has cruised through. Zingy, refreshing and yet with a burgeoning complexity that will evolve over time. A rare and amazing wine.