Blog
Announcing the Release of 2010 Pinot Noirs
Wednesday, February 29th, 2012
Greetings from Santa Barbara Wine Country:
We are excited to announce the release of three new 2010 Pinot Noirs. Ever since the quick disappearance of the 2010 Presidio Vineyard Pinot Noir, we have been itching to get the rest of the 2010 Pinots in bottle. However, patience is one of the key ingredients in fine wine, and additional barrel aging creates complexity and enhances depth and integration. In December, we did exhaustive tastings of every barrel of Pinot Noir and determined that the time had come. And so in January we bottled three new wines. We have fulfilled our promise to the Wine Club that they get first crack at the new releases, and so we are ready to offer them to the wider public. As always, these Pinot Noirs are extremely limited and will sell out fast. Act now or, better yet, join the wine club and guarantee that you will get at least a few of these terrific Pinot Noirs.
2010 Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills $42
This wine is a blend of top sites in the Sta. Rita Hills appellation, where foggy mornings give way to windy afternoons with brilliant sunshine, perfect for Pinot Noir. This wine is composed of grapes from the dramatic, steep and windswept slopes of John Sebastiano Vineyard, with some additions from Cargasacchi, Fiddlestix, La Encantada and Zotovich. The grapes are hand harvested and sorted in the vineyard in the cold early mornings, destemmed without crushing, given a 4-7 day cold soak, carefully fermented (native yeast where possible), drained and pressed straight to barrel. After 15 months aging in barrel, without racking, the wine is painstakingly blended for complexity and balance. This wine is already exuberantly generous, and it will go fast as always. Only 300 cases made.
Our Tasting Note: The dramatic nose combines spicy dark black cherry and red raspberry notes with vanilla, cocoa, nutmeg and hints of fresh herbs. On the palate this fairly full bodied wine is substantial but measured, combining waves of fully ripe fruit (fresh and preserved cherries (Luxardo) and sweet raspberries) with hints of chocolate and brown sugar. Fresh ripe acidity and serious but pliant tannins result in a long, velvety-textured and satisfying finish. Pair with grilled lamb or beef, mushrooms, or savory sauced pork dishes.
2010 Pinot Noir, Fiddlestix Vineyard $54
The famed Fiddlestix vineyard performed terrifically in the tricky 2010 vintage. For the past several years, we have selected clones 113 and 115 from particularly well situated blocks in this expertly managed vineyard. The 113 gives spice and high toned red fruits, the 115 a deeper darker classic black cherry fruit with great structure. With partial whole cluster fermentation and 33% new French oak adding complexity, this wine has all the stuffing to improve for several years in bottle. Compared to the 2009 this wine is more vivacious and exuberant early on, showing lots of rich fruit flavors.
Our Tasting Note: On the nose, the wine shows classic Fiddlestix red fruits (cranberry, raspberry and candied cherry) with spice cake, a touch of cocoa and some minty herbal notes from the whole clusters. The palate is medium to full bodied, but never heavy, as classic Sta. Rita Hills black cherry, hints of cola and baking spices envelope ripe and refreshing acidity, and solid balancing tannic structure. Extremely limited, only 150 cases made.
2010 Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills, The Black Label $75
A remarkable blend of our best barrels of 2010, this is destined to the best Pinot we have made to date. The wine is comprised of 2 barrels of Cargasacchi Santa Rita Hills clone 115, 1 of Fiddlestix clone 115 and one barrel of La Encantada clone 667. The La Encantada barrel (new Francois Freres) was so deep, concentrated and complex that we simply had to consider making a reserve level wine. Blending trials confirmed that it married perfectly with Cargasacchi, and the addition of the spicy, higher toned Fiddlestix made it even better. This is the MJM of Pinot Noir, and so it received the Black Label. Less than 100 cases made.
Our Tasting Note: On the nose, dark, brooding, super black cherry and hints of game from the Cargassachi, classic high register red fruits, with baking spices from the Fiddlestix, and sweet black cherry, forest floor and vanilla from La Encantada. On the palate the wine is bigger and brasher than the “SRH”, with waves of fruit, baking spices (pumpkin pie, cinnamon), and hints of perfectly integrated toast. The texture is pure, silky and full bodied, and finishes long and sappy, with lift provided by round acidity and ripe tannins.
2011 Rose of Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills $20
Speaking of Pinot Noir, we made a tiny amount of Rose from the saignee of our fantastic 2011 Pinots. Juice is pulled from the fermenters after 24 hours of skin contact, transferred to neutral barrels and fermented to complete dryness. Substantial for a Rose, the wine drinks like a baby pinot noir, with cherry and cola notes, and luscious, lip smacking acidity. A warm sunny President’s Day weekend put a serious dent in our limited supply of 50 cases. Get some of this gem today.
Small Production Means Limited Availability
It is an old story at this point, but we sold out of 2008 and 2009 Pinots very quickly. Many of you were left disappointed. We don’t want this to happen to you! Order today.
Note to Wine Club members: You received the 2010 Pinot Noir, Sta. Rita Hills in the winter shipment and you will receive the Fiddlestix and Black Label in future shipments; however, if you want any more than your present allocation, you should order additional bottles now. Past history indicates that the Pinots will be gone and reorders impossible. You will have to trust us and your past experience and know these are beautiful, painstakingly hand crafted wines that will disappear in a flash.
Finally,
As always, we thank you for your patronage and for joining us in our journey. We have been delighted by the critical and consumer response to our wines, and we promise to continue searching out the best vineyards, applying best vineyard management practices to our blocks, and meticulously working in the cellar to make great wines from this amazingly diverse, world class wine region. The best is yet to come, as we mature as a region and as a winery.
We look forward to seeing you soon and sharing our latest creations with you. Oh, and make sure you get some Pinot Noir before it disappears…
Cheers!
Coming Soon…
Thursday, January 19th, 2012
Make sure your mailing list and wine club information is up to date…Pinot Noir is coming soon!
A Note on Wine Quality and Cost by John Dragonette
Wednesday, October 6th, 2010
As you probably know, winemaking involves careful attention to detail in all steps of the process, including care of the maturing wines in the cellar. The wines are not just sitting idly in barrels; we are constantly monitoring, topping, racking if need be, and watching other indicators. The typical 18-24 month period, known as elevage, is actually fraught with activity, analysis, and contemplation. Topping our barrels the other day and occasionally tasting as I went along (it is not a totally thankless job), I was truly excited about the quality of the wines we made in 2008 and 2009. Apparently you have been too – the 2008 Pinot Noirs are flying off the shelves (only a bit of the Fiddlestix remains). The 2008 Syrah we just bottled promises great things when it is ready for prime time as well. And the 2009s are a cornucopia of terrific new vineyards and varietals. It is an exciting time for us.
And yet there is a serious recession going on. We get it. We see the effects everywhere. In the wine business, for some this has meant troubled wineries, distributor consolidation and heavy discounting by distressed producers. Some of these “deals” are indeed deals, and some are perhaps wineries dumping less than their best wines. In some cases the wines should never have been priced as high to begin with. We know that much of this wine is being sold below cost – it has to be. This does not bode well for the health of the winery. But more importantly perhaps, this era of discounting and price cutting can have serious ramifications for wine quality going forward. If price is all that matters, there are ways to save money – starting in the vineyard. Growers can produce vastly more grapes per acre, they can skip important mid season steps, and they can skimp and save on labor, meaning, usually, lower quality fruit. Wineries can buy grapes from huge industrially farmed vineyards in poor locations. Or we can stop producing wine grapes here in Santa Barbara entirely and buy bulk juice from someplace else with super cheap land and labor. But is that what wine is all about?
We feel very strongly that the consuming public and in particular our fans, can tell the difference between wines from only top vineyards, meticulously farmed and carefully vinified from those made “on the cheap” with super high yields, indifferent vineyards and all manner of winemaker tricks. We believe that you who have tasted our wines (and those from other serious producers) appreciate the purity and expression of a fine wine. More serious wines cost more to make. There is a reason that the French and Italians, and more recently the Americans have classified grape growing areas to highlight quality, limited permitted yields and banned certain practices. In short all wine is not the same.
We believe that despite the downturn, the wine drinking public is becoming more and more educated in terms of wine quality; meaning grape origin and growing practices, winemaking processes and producer commitment. We can tell this by the types of questions we are getting in the tasting room, and the interest we see in us and other small artisanal producers here in Santa Barbara Wine Country. We think they can tell the difference in the purity of wines produced by hand from excellent raw materials and without manipulation. And, we believe that as more and more people become wine lovers they will appreciate and demand quality wines over innocuous ones that simply happen to be cheap. We pledge to continue to farm grapes and produce wine with ultra high quality as a goal for those wine consumers.
As we go along with these mailing list updates, we intend to continue to inform you, the wine loving public, as to the care and attention our wines receive the particulars and costs of high quality farming, and other salient topics. We think you will appreciate knowing a little more about the realities of grape farming and wine production. We want you to understand our philosophy and why we started making wine in the first place. So stay tuned!
Bottling fun
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
As most wine production people know, when it comes to bottling, the best a winemaker can hope for is that nothing goes terribly wrong. One expects a bit of broken glass, label malfunctions, and cork setting problems but hopes to avoid major problems that leave crews sitting around idle for hours while repairmen argue in Italian over the un-locatable fix to the problem. For example our first bottling ever involved about 25 cases of bad-labeled bottles and four hours of troubleshooting the problem before we had to abandon the bottling and reschedule it for a few days later when replacement parts could be found. In another (very small) bottling, only seven of the eight fillers worked properly, and after messing with the line for a couple hours, we gave up and had to uncork the half filled bottles and pour the wine back into tank. Not the most efficient process to be sure. There is a lot riding on these fateful days. Our precious juice has made a very long (and expensive) journey from vine to fermenter to barrel and we are anxious to get it safely into bottle.
Of course bottling day is the culmination of many months of planning. We have to design and re-design the labels several times (and then submit them to the Federal Tax and Trade Bureau for approval), evaluate numerous bottle samples from several manufacturers (and of course, the one you like best will likely be back-ordered after spending 3 weeks making the decision to use it), evaluate cork samples, and choose wax colors (yes, we are gluttons for punishment and wax all of our bottles by hand). Not to be overlooked in the bottling process is racking and blending the wine which is a delicate operation, particularly when you bottle unfiltered, and we have to carefully separate the juice from the lees. On bottling day itself, there is a whir of activity, with unloading bottles, reloading the filled bottles into cases, palletizing the cases and storing the finished ones out of the ways. The entire operation looks like a giant beehive; people scampering in all directions, all-intent on their work activities.
So it is with great relief that we announce that despite a few hiccups, Dragonette Cellars had a hugely successful (and remarkably efficient) bottling last week. We managed to get about 1100 cases of 2008 Syrah and 2009 Sauvignon Blanc into bottle with only a single broken bottle (and that was only an empty!) and only a handful of bad labels. It should be noted here that we did narrowly avoid having 325 cases of Syrah being unlabeled as the freight company lost 1 of the boxes of labels shipped from our manufacturer. Luckily, I was able to track the package down to Santa Maria and was able to dash off and go get it as we bottled up one of our Sauvignon Blancs first. Whew!
A huge shout out goes to the friends and family that came out to give a hand with this bottling. The crew was magnificent and made the day as easy as it could be. Grazie!
Dragonette Cellars adds a wine club
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010
OK, OK, OK, we give. Everyone kept asking, “When are you going to have a wine club I can join?” The wait is over. You will now be able to get all the Dragonette Cellars wines you want without lifting a finger. We have a few different options that will hopefully fill everyone’s needs. Wine Club signups can be done either through our online store or by emailing/faxing/mailing in the order form.
Announcing our Fall 2009 release
Thursday, September 24th, 2009
We are proud to announce the release of our very limited production 2007 Pinot Noirs.
Announcing our Spring 2009 Release
Thursday, July 2nd, 2009
We are proud to announce the release of our debut Sauvignon Blanc, our delicious summer Rosé, and the first of the great 2007 Vintage Reds.
