California Chardonnay comes with such a preconception (oak, vanilla, fat), but it's an incredible and versatile variety in California. But what I'm really excited about is Chardonnay. Sonoma make great light red wines, like Pinot this is a spirited version of that. Laurent is a rare Austrian varietal that we discovered growing down the road from us. On April 9 we're releasing our first-ever St. Which wine are you most excited about right now and why?Īdam: We have a new wine in our Field Guide series, which is where we experiment with different varieties or dramatic techniques in the cellar. It's less and less about our hands in the cellar the vineyard has more to say than we do. As we learn more, it gives us confidence to do less in the cellar: let the fruit ferment naturally, less movement, less intervention, more transparency from the fruit to the glass. With each vintage, our relationship with and understanding of the vineyard gets deeper, and we experiment with every vintage in the cellar. Have your wines evolved since you first opened Scribe? Has your philosophy about winemaking changed at all, or have certain core principles remained mostly intact?Īndrew: My brother, Adam, and I are fourth-generation California farmers, so having that agricultural base-a focus on farming and the celebration of the land-was paramount in the beginning and still is. Globally speaking, California is still a relatively young wine-growing region, so whereas in other parts of the world the regional expression/approach/philosophies are more defined, California is wide open and evolving quickly. So it's not that we're inventing any new methods it's more about what we aren't doing in the cellar. How do your methods differ from some of the older, more traditional models?Īdam: We strive to make terroir-driven wines that express the site, which requires a noninterventionist approach in the cellar. You're one of the younger winemakers out there, but winemaking is an age-old process. It's a beautiful, energetic place, and the wines should reflect that." Light mineral-rich soils cool, salty, crisp breeze clear blue skies. We get a cool breeze every afternoon, either from the Bay or from the Pacific through the Petaluma Gap. Our vines grown on the lower slope of Arrowhead Mountain in light volcanic tufa soils and down into the clay loams of the Carneros flats. The Scribe farm is located at a crossroads, between Sonoma and Napa Counties, and where Arrowhead Mountain dies into the San Pablo Bay (the northern part of the San Francisco Bay). We also planted Chardonnay and Pinot Noir, the gems of our region. We planted Sylvaner and Riesling as on ode to the original growers. Such high praise coupled with the Scribe's penchant for playing with grapes that aren't typically associated with Sonoma (think Riesling and Sylvaner) was more than enough to convince the brothers that Mission was raring for a revival.No one made wine here again until we arrived, so in one sense, Scribe has been a revival of this old historic vineyard: new, but rooted in the past. "Therefore, they may prove with their sweetness and high percentage of genuine alcohol, splendid cutwines for our pour, sour growths of the last three crops." The notes go on to liken still red Mission wine to the best wines of Burgundy. The feedback surrounding Dresel's Mission wines in particular was –– for a grape that most modern American drinkers have never heard of –– surprisingly glowing: "These wines of the Mission grape are pure of taste, ripe, and unctuous," the review reads. Six years ago, he and his brother found a copy of an 1872 newspaper article from the San Francisco Alta California and learned that Julius Dresel, one of the estate's previous growers, had sent a sampling of his bottles for a professional tasting panel review in Geisenheim, Germany. "Mission was originally brought to California by the Spanish missionaries, and from what we can discern, it was widely planted until prohibition," Andrew explains.
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