Marin

Marin County is one of the harder places in California to grow grapes. Cold, rocky, shallow soil, not enough water, fog that sits past noon. The growers here are stubborn people. We have worked with two of them, Kendric and Corda, both farming organically, both growing Pinot Noir on parcels that look like they should not be growing anything at all.

The 2020 fruit came in slow. Sugars stalled in the high teens, acids stayed high, the bunches were small and tight. We pressed whole-cluster, settled the juice clean for forty-eight hours, and fermented in neutral barrel with native yeast at sixty to seventy degrees for three weeks. The fermentation sediment stayed in barrel for twelve months, no sulfur added, full malolactic completion. Then bottled with fresh yeast and a touch of sugar; seventeen months on the lees in glass.

At disgorgement, the wine showed savory more than fruit-forward, structure more than weight, a slow opening rather than a loud one. We added one gram per liter of dosage. The bottles were recapped under crown cap; we prefer it for ageability.

The wine is a Blanc de Noir, which is to say a white made entirely from red grapes (one hundred percent Pinot Noir). It pours the color of straw and drinks the color of memory. There are 1,764 bottles. Marin grows quietly. So does this.