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| Old World Winery “L’Aureate” 2024 Old World Winery “Single Cloud” 2023 Old World Winery “Rise” 2021 Old World Winery “Abundance” 2021 Old World Winery “Abourious” Reserve 2011 |
| We’re thrilled to welcome Darek Trowbridge back for this week’s tasting, during which we’ll sample new releases of old favorites that you may have already discovered at the shop, as well as wines that are new to our shelves. A fourth-generation California grape grower, Darek has an eccentric, ever-curious, and engaged wine brain, and you always leave a conversation with him with enhanced neuroplasticity and always more questions than answers.
When I visited Darek last year, I was blown away by the vast mountain of wood chips located on one side of his property. He explained that he employs wood chips as ground cover for all of his plantings, and the mountain is periodically replenished by the truckload by arborist friends—much to the chagrin of the county, which looks askance at massive mounds of mulch, as the fermenting mass generates heat and can present a fire hazard. Indeed, I shoved my hand deep into the fermenting mass, and it felt like a heating pad, and I understood how it might pose a fire risk (he assured me that the mulch mountain quickly finds its way into the various plots he works in Sonoma). All too often, we look at organic agriculture as a matter of inputs and outputs and fail to consider Rodale’s central argument: organic farming is all about building soil health, and healthy soil yields more nutritious and flavorful fruit. Mulch and the thriving soil biome that it facilitates are key to everything Darek does. Darek once observed, “I like to fix broken things,” and he does operate as a bit of a vineyard savior, taking neglected and abused parcels and bringing them back to productive life. We’ll be tasting a wine, now with 15 years of bottle age, made from a plot of centenarian abouriou planted by his great-grandfather in the 1890s. Few in California work this old variety from southwestern France, and fewer than 1,000 acres of it are still under cultivation in France today. I asked Darek why his great-grandfather chose to work with this obscure grape, and his response was simply, “he liked it.” We’ll also be tasting new releases of two customer favorites: one is “L’Aureate,” a skin-contact chardonnay that’s 180 degrees different than pretty much any other California manifestation of the variety; the other is “Single Cloud,” a co-fermentation of red and white grapes from a tiny vineyard that you can circumambulate in ten minutes. To follow, three other co-fermentations, all from different plots, and with quite a varied roster of varieties, ranging from mondeuse to trousseau gris. |