History

These 100+ year old vines at the Louvau Vineyard grow straight out of the rocky ground on the “bench” of the east Dry Creek Valley, our favorite terroir for Zinfandel in the Dry Creek Valley. In fact, these vines were hidden away under a thick patch of raspberry vines and weeds when John Louvau bought the property in the late ‘70s. It was only after he cleared the weeds to plant grapevines did he discover that he already had a small vineyard on the property: old, gnarled trunks of Zinfandel that were around 80 years old. The vines are head-trained and are pruned so that they are quite low to the ground, resulting in tiny yields of concentrated fruit.

Production

Luckily for us (given the fires of 2017) we harvested these grapes much earlier than is typical for this vineyard, on the 29th of August. The warm summer days (and cool nights) produced optimal maturity, and resulted in dark, concentrated fruit and a wine with great structure and complexity. As always, we hand-sorted the grapes on a conveyor belt to eliminate leaves, rocks, or imperfect fruit. The crushed grapes were then fermented using only the native yeast population on the surface of the grapes to conduct the fermentation. At dryness, the wine was gently pressed in a membrane press and pumped to 120-gallon oak puncheons. The wine was aged for 18 months to develop complexity without too much oak character to deter from the wine’s vibrancy. 

Production: 82 cases

Tasting Notes