Passeggiata - SOLD OUT

Retail Price: $26

Production: 235 cases

Description:  Passeggiata is a light to medium bodied wine, with a translucent ruby color and hints of raspberries and butterscotch on the nose. This wine dances across the palate with notes of vanilla, red fruits and exotic spices.

Vintage: 2006 was a season of ups and downs in terms of weather. A warm and dry April preceded a normal month of May. June was bright and sunny through flowering, but the skies opened up for a record 6 inches of rain June 22nd and 23rd, thankfully after the flowering was finished. A typical July was followed by essentially no rain in a hot August, which had the potential to stress the vines; but September and October were cool, with about twice the normal rainfall, and the vines got the water they needed. The hot August weather and intermittent periods of sun in the fall were enough to ripen the fruit fully and produce complex, well-balanced wines.

Vineyard: Mostly West and South facing, planted at 1895 vines per acre. Production was limited to 10 clusters per vine, yielding 3.3 tons per acre, or slightly more than one bottle per vine.

Fruit handling: Each lot was hand picked by our field crew, cooled overnight, hand sorted by cluster, destemmed, and sorted again by hand to remove remaining stems and imperfect berries. The whole berries were lightly crushed and gravity-loaded into our temperature controlled stainless steel tanks, then immediately blended with juice from other Syrah lots.

Vinification: Kept cool for one week to integrate the flavors of the different lots, 60% of Passegiata was fermented at 65 degrees for two weeks in stainless steel, and racked into once used French oak barrels with malolactic fermentation done in barrel. The other 40% was fermented in French oak barrels and did not go through malolactic fermentation. The wine spent a total of 16 months in barrel. It was topped and stirred weekly for 6 months, then topped bi-weekly until it was bottled, on April 2nd, 2008.