Wines from the Deep.
Five wines from five coastal places, chosen once a year, disgorged by hand, released first to the club and rarely to anyone else. These are the bottles we have waited on.
V21Solera' Brut
The blend across vintages, our cellar's working memory. Pinot and Chardonnay from the cool corners of California: Santa Cruz, Marin, Santa Rita. Each lot is pressed whole-cluster, fermented in barrel with native yeast, and held without sulfur for eleven to twenty-three months. Some of these barrels were filled in 2018 and waited four years for company. You can taste the patience: barrel weight, a spine of acid that survives a heavy meal, a finish that keeps coming. The wine for the table on a Tuesday, which is the hardest wine to make.
Marin
Two organically-farmed parcels in Marin County, vines worked by people who know what cold and rocky and barely-enough-water cost them in a season. The fruit comes in slow and small. We press whole-cluster, ferment in barrel with native yeast, and let the wine sit on its sediment for a year before bottling. Seventeen months en tirage, then a one-gram dosage, then nothing. Savory, structured, the color of straw left in the rain. A blanc de noir written in a whisper, which is how Marin grows.
Corralitos
Sandy decomposed-marine soils, fifteen miles inland from the Monterey Bay, three neighboring vineyards on the same windbreak. Pinot has never made more sense to us than at sparkling levels of ripeness here. The vintage spent twelve months unsulfured in barrel, twenty-two months on its lees in bottle, then a three-gram dosage. There is fruit in this wine; there is also bone. The 2019 vintage rests inside it for context, blended in for a little more time and a little more salt. Drinkable now, sharper in five years.
La VidaBella.
Three barrels of Pinot, one of Chardonnay, all from a single vineyard on a slightly higher Corralitos hillside that catches more sun once the morning fog burns off. These were the standout barrels in a standout year, and at disgorgement we tried dosage and didn't like it; the wine answered for itself. Less than a hundred cases, no addition, just topped with itself. The closest a sparkling gets to a still wine in a blind glass: weight, focus, a long savory finish.
Bald Mountain
Our first single-vineyard label and the rarest of the Reserves: 852 bottles from the last harvest of a thirty-year-old, own-rooted Chardonnay block hanging three miles off the Pacific in the Ben Lomond AVA. White zayante soil, beach sand by another name, vines that struggled hard their whole lives and rewarded patience with a tiny crop of tense, mineral fruit. Fifteen months in bottle on the lees. Zero dosage at disgorgement, sixteen more months of rest after. Jeb Dunnuck called the result a 98-point wine. Library release.
All five, once a year, first bottle to your door.
The Carboniste Reserve Club receives one bottle of each release in the order they come out of the cellar. You read the essay; we handle the glass. Three hundred and sixty-five dollars per year, shipping included, allocation priority on every library bottle.