Growing Conditions

With our Moscato, we introduce vintage 2013 to our customers. Like vintage 2012, it was ‘perfect’ by nearly all grape-growing standards in that yields were slightly above average, the weather was evenly warm, and fruit moved toward ideal ripeness without the fits and starts of the preceding two vintages. This produced wines with tremendous fruit flavors and textural depth. If you’re wondering if we in the Napa Valley ever tire of ‘perfect’ vintages, the answer is “not at all”. Our dry Moscato is made with several pleasurable things in mind, one of them being eating oysters on the half-shell, so, for our Moscato, we choose to focus on the blossom and sweet herbal components of the Muscat grape rather than that of cloying perfume. We also want to give it a bit of a grip in the mouth. We achieve this by picking at a fairly low sugar and crushing the fruit back onto the stems to soak for several hours before pressing. (Muscat is a very pulpy grape, and the stems provide channels for the juice to migrate through inside the press cake). After a gentle pressing, we settle it cold overnight and rack it to old 500L barrels to ferment. The 2013 is perhaps our most complex Moscato to date - “complex” being a word you don’t often hear to describe the variety. The list of aroma descriptors is long and includes white strawberries, clover, spearmint, beeswax, green hay, and apricot nectar. At 12.4% alcohol, the mouth is fresh and light but loaded with the aforementioned flavors. It is bone dry and thrilling to taste.