SPRING 2012
Some thoughts on the unique 2010 vintage
While some found the 2010 vintage to be challenging or even hellish, we loved it! Sure, with any difficult vintage (cool weather, excessive heat, high rainfall) there will be some hiccups, but overall we were able to craft a simply thrilling lineup of wines. Hopefully you enjoyed some of the rosé--and don’t forget the riesling (available now, but we’ll formally introduce it late this spring) because it is simply stunning! In this offering we feature another 2010, our sauvignon blanc from McGinley vineyard, another exciting wine that was strongly influenced by the unusual growing conditions in 2010. And I must mention the pinot noirs. Although it will be a year before we sell the first of them, they are my best efforts to date.
Weather trumps everything else in grape growing, and the summer of 2010 was the summer that never arrived. In warm Ojai it never got hot, and in Santa Maria and Lompoc, it was downright cold. This had a profound effect on the vines and the grapes they produced. Hot weather burns off delicate aromatics and acidity and helps produce lots of sugar, so cool 2010 gave us grapes and wines of unusual aromatic intensity and fresh acidity--all brought together with a gentler texture due to lower alcohol.
This harvest really had its ups and downs. We lazed around waiting for that perfect moment to pick the pinot noir, and after days and weeks of no change in the usual indicators of ripeness--sugar and acidity—I got this feeling that I should just go for it and pick. I couldn't believe that, the day after we were finished, the temperature jumped up into the 100s while the humidity dropped to the teens. Within two days, all the pinot left out in the field turned to raisins. We had lucked out picking when we did, and the wines, bottled in December, are sensational.
The later varietals were unaffected by the heat—in fact they were helped because they needed the warmth to ripen. But some of the cooler climate syrahs were the most challenging to make because we had to wait right up until the end of October and the beginning of the rainy season to let them ripen, and a few wines never made it. What was truly exciting about some of the more marginal sites was the physiological maturity we achieved at such modest ripeness. The cool weather prevented sugar accumulation but still allowed the fruit to develop mature flavors as it lingered on the vines. We have some syrahs from 2010 that are sweet, fruity, deliciously peppery with an elegance rarely found in California wines.
Adam Tolmach