North America | California | Camins 2 Dreams | Mencia Paicines Ranch Vineyard

Mencia Paicines Ranch Vineyard

VARIETAL
Mencia

NOTES

VINEYARD: Paicines Ranch is known for its regenerative vineyard practices. The vineyard is a uniquely designed polyculture with a partial overhead trellis system that allows for grazing of the vines throughout the year. This eliminates the need for tillage, mowing, herbicides, suckering, hand weeding and encourages high biodiversity of plants, insects, birds and soil biology. Diablo clay soil.

FARMING: Biodynamic, Organic, Regenerative Organic

VINIFICATION: Harvested in early September. Fermented with indigenous yeast. The fermentations start pied a cuve, using indigenous yeasts present on the fruit from individual sites. They use sunlight to get fermentations going, rolling their square fermenters out of the small cellar and into the warm courtyard behind the building. The fermenters vary in size from a tiny half-ton capacity vessel, to a (still tiny) 1.5 ton cube. All the fruit passes over a sorting table. Tara also tries to presort during the harvest, removing blemished or unripe clusters, and stray vegetation. Some of the fruit is fermented whole-cluster. There’s no set recipe. The couple only add small amounts of SO2 to their wines at bottling. They scrupulously steam clean all the winery’s small collection of neutral oak barrels, to avoid any contamination or off flavors. The meticulously clean workspace they inhabit speaks to an understanding of what is necessary to make natural, low-intervention wines without flaws. Aged 10 months in neutral French oak. Bottled unfined, unfiltered.