Varieties: 46% Semillon, 29% Ribolla Gialla 23% Sauvignon Blanc, and 2% Tocai Friulano
Location: Napa Valley, CA
Alcohol: 12%

The 2021 White Wine has its trademark spice and mineral quality, and another perfect growing season helped the wine deliver plenty of acidity and freshness. Trademark flavors include white peach, kaffir lime, lychee nut, beeswax, ripe fig, and pineapple, with prominent wet stones, flint, oyster shells, and freshly baled straw.

The fruit was very lightly whole-cluster-pressed. All four varieties were blended immediately upon dryness, racked and returned onto the lees for aging until bottling. We used 15% new Boutes barrels, with no stirring. To preserve all the acidity the wine was prevented from going through malo-lactic fermentation. After ten months of barrel aging, the wine was filtered to prevent malolactic fermentation in bottle, and then bottled.

The two vineyards are both in the cool and foggy southern part of the Napa Valley. The Sauvignon blanc and Semillon come from Ryan’s Vineyard, which sits on a streak of alluvial gravel in the center of the valley floor, in the south part of Napa. It is right in the path of the daily wind current that pulls up through the valley from the San Francisco Bay towards Calistoga. Native grasses are planted under the vines to compete for moisture and nutrients and encourage the roots to forage down deep in the gravelly soil. The Ribolla gialla and Tocai friulano are from the tiny Bengier Vineyard (formerly Vare), in the mouth of Napa’s Dry Creek canyon, right next to the creek. The rocky fluvial soil and cool air drainage of the canyon works perfectly with the variety. Ribolla gialla is an extremely old variety cultivated since medieval times in the Collio region of Italy and Slovenia.