Las Jaras Wines Nouveau Old Vines Mendocino County 2024

Varieties
49% Zinfandel | 33% Carignan | 16% Petite Sirah | 7% Vermentino

All of the grapes used for this blend are farmed organically. Harvest was very late this year and we were fortunate enough to have some wonderful grape sources in Lodi where grapes tend to ripen earlier. Cherryhouse was planted in the 40’s, , Leticia in the 40’s, and the Gary Venturi vineyard was planted in the mid 50’s. The Vermentino is a recent planting and we love it in the blend..

Winemaking
The pick dates for this wine were between August 19th and September 18th. To make this wine we employed several different winemaking techniques. We believe that layering differing winemaking methods and varieties creates a wine with a lot of intrigue. We really don’t like cookie cutter one-note wines. We used carbonic maceration for half of the Zinfandel and all of the Carignan, this is a perfect method for grapes that are picked earlier with higher acidity. After 10 days of carbonic maceration at about 55F, we warmed up the tanks and gave them a daily pump over for three days to get a bit more color and a cleaner ferment. After this period we pressed the grapes lightly added 10ppm SO2 and fermented each lot separately in a warm tank. Once the wines were dry we stored them cool for a number of weeks and got quite good settling and clarity. The Petite Sirah was fermented with a 25/75 reverse saignee; meaning we direct pressed 75% of the fruit and added to the balance, which was destemmed. The remaining zinfandel was a regular destemmed ferment and the vermentino was whole cluster pressed and barrel fermented. Two days before bottling we racked the tank and added 15ppm SO2 to protect from any oxygen the wine picked up during bottling.