2016 Pinot Noir The Cauldron

• - Harvest date:  September 21, 2016
• - Fruit source:  Estate South Block, own-rooted Pommard clone planted 1979
• - Grapes at harvest: Brix 23.2, pH 3.29, TA 7.0 gr/liter
• - Finished wine: Alcohol 13.9%, pH 3.59, TA 5.9 gr/liter
• - Barrel aged 15 months in French oak, 33% new barrels
• - 97 cases bottled unfined January 16, 2018

BEYOND THE BLOCKS

The Cauldron is part of 4-wine series launched in 2014 by our second-generation winemaker, Ben Casteel, to explore the terroir of our Estate vineyards through a new lens.
 

WINEMAKER NOTES

Because the Cauldron is one of the warmer parts of our vineyard, my concern with warmer years like 2016 is that the wines will reflect the growing season more than where the grapes are planted, so our team was very careful with extraction.  The resulting wine from the Cauldron shows layers of forest floor, clove, and camphor intertwined with black cherry near the pits and black currant.  The tannins are firm, but with time I think will reveal a broad, expansive wine with the complexity we love in our old Pommard Blocks.  

At its most fundamental, terroir encompasses all the limiting conditions of the place you’ve decided to plant some grapes: geology, geography, topography, climate, ampelography, and on and on.  Terroir does not fit neatly into the tidy rectangles of vineyard blocks.  We had to start looking beyond the blocks, following where the wines lead us. While we respect our history and what we learned in the process, we don’t allow it to hold us back from where we may go next. 

~ Ben Casteel
 

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