Oakville, Napa Valley

Always a crowd favorite when shared at the end of a hearty meal, the 2017 Late Harvst Zin follows our tradition of making a serious late picked varietal wine. This 2017 red is delightfully showy with aromas of raspberry jam, sweet alcohols, cotton candy and Bing cherry. The palate is utterly decadent with black pepper, chewy red preserves, grape jelly and a touch of sour cherry. Although the acid and tannin balance appear in this wine, they are not aggressive and will prove very useful in keeping the pulse of this Zinfandel going deep into ageing.

In The Vineyard

The entire 19 year old Zinfandel block exists in two rows on our Oakville Estate vineyard, at a mere ¼ acre. Using traditional techniques of dry farming and head and trellis training, the vines were able to achieve incredible depth and complexity. At harvest the fruit looks and feels like it has given absolutely everything it has to offer the vintage.

The mature fruit was hand harvested into half-ton bins. We wait to pick until we can identify the grapes appearing more like golf balls than perfectly round berries.  Combined yields were small and could barely be squeezed out to yield 2 barrels.

In The Cellar

After careful cluster sorting, the sweet but tired black bunches were destemmed into open top, insulated bins where fermentation took place for nearly 15 days. Gentle “punch downs” by hand were employed to gently homogenize the fermentation two times daily. At the proper time during fermentation, the fruit was lightly pressed as not to supply too much tannin and astringency, and then put direct to cask. The wine was matured on gross yeast lees settlings for 10 months in three 100% new Virginia Oak by Nadalie Cooperage. Neither the removal of tannin via fining nor any sulfites were employed during the barrel ageing of this wine. Sulfites were only added prior to the bottling. Cellared correctly, the 2017 L.H.Z. should survive until 2028 or longer.