In this episode of Paso Robles Wine Country's podcast "Where Wine Takes You", host Adam Montiel speaks with me about our Sense of Place here at Calcareous Vineyard. Join me!

If you're thinking about purchasing, or better yet, pulling the cork on one of our new spring releases, I invite you to sit down, click on each of the wines below, and taste along with me. I'll review the vintage with you, and the results it had on how we farmed the land and the techniques I used in the cellar to produce the finest wines our calcareous soil could provide.

And in these videos, I'm also excited to show off our new wine labels! After decades of producing noteworthy, collectible, and truly distinctive wines, we realized along the way that our wine labels never quite reflected the beauty and quality of what was inside each bottle. So this refresh was past due, and we are excited to give our members first access to these new wines donning our new look in this club exclusive pre-release. In my 2022 Zinfandel video below, I tell you a little more about why we designed them the way we did, so be sure to check it out. I hope you'll check out all the videos, and I hope you enjoy these new wines!

Head Winemaker, Jason Joyce

Click on each wine above to watch the video!

The much feared early rainfall never materialized and the temperature remained warm and mild well into November, so more than half of our Estate fruit was allowed to hang onthe vines for an extended time. This later picked fruit had much rounder tannins, lower acid, and a softer ripe fruit character. The color was equally dark yet more purple in hue.  

This winter, as we revisit the wines after a bit of barrel aging, we will start the blending process. This year's blending will be more intensive as the stark difference in character between all the picks will allow for the creation of extremely complex wines. The single varietal wines such as Cab, Syrah, and Grenache will be blends to a certain extent. Even the Devil's Canyon Syrah was split in picks between the top and bottom halves of the vineyard block, thus allowing for a more nuanced expression.  

Overall I am extremely excited about these wines. I've never had such varied ingredients to play with in creating the final wines, so the potential for some extremely powerful, complex and unique wines is unmatched in my time here.

Jason Joyce
Winemaker

It is mid-May, and there is still no sign of flowering in the vineyard, even in our Chardonnay. This is just a bit behind schedule, but with warmer, longer days now arriving, the vineyard will catch up quickly. Counting the inflorescences (the "pre-flowers" that turn into grapes) the overall yield appears to be about average. This is encouraging, as it should supply a generous canopy-to-fruit ratio, allowing the vines to protect the fruit during summer and also drive ripeness. 

The job of the winemaker during vintages like this is to understand that the challenge is balancing the vines' ability to fully ripen the fruit, while still capturing vibrancy and the earthier elements that make a wine truly Calcareous. 

Head Winemaker, Jason Joyce

In this Wine Club exclusive pre-release, we are proud to introduce the 2022 Viognier, 2021 Trés Violet, 2021 Reserve Grenache, and 2021 Estate Syrah. I hope you enjoy!

Head Winemaker, Jason Joyce

Click on each wine above to watch the video!

With the addition of ten owl boxes on property, housing our native Barn Owls and Great Horned Owls, plus other boxes that act as catchalls, we are able to keep only beneficial animals in our vineyard.

From controlling our water supply and usage, to producing our own electricity, we take great care with our resources. Since installing solar panels in 2019, we have been consistently producing more power than we use.

We have discontinued the use of spraying herbicides under our vines. During winter and spring we let the native grasses and flowers choke out weeds, and then simply mow and hoe after vegetative growth begins in earnest. We have seen better moisture retention and a drop in both noxious weeds and harmful pests.

We've updated our fleet! For the first time ever, we were able to haul grapes for the 2022 vintage by electric truck. 

We hope you enjoy tasting the rewards of our Earth-friendly efforts!

Head Winemaker, Jason Joyce

Our wet and cold winter has continued here at Calcareous, and it is a most welcome development for our vineyard.

In addition to the wet weather this winter, we are also benefitting from the fact that it has remained very cold. It takes a combination of warming nights and longer days to wake the vines from dormancy, leading to bud break. The past 2 winters were so dry and sunny, bud break began in mid/late February. However this year, we are now into March and there is still no sign of it. With the vines still in deep slumber when the snow started falling (for only the second time ever recorded at our Estate!) we were able to enjoy beautiful sights and snowball fights. If this had happened during last year’s early bud break, it could have been a disaster. So all things are looking up, with a late bud break hopefully helping to push harvest back to a more typical September start after last year’s early start in August.

Head Winemaker, Jason Joyce

The reason we as winemakers age wine before allowing it to be tasted by others is that we are obsessed with balance.   The ultimate goal is to show a wine whose features are all in harmony, each adding a piece to a greater whole.  When wine is young, the freshness and fruit are overly dominant.  The structural elements and more nuanced aromas and flavors feel out of place or are lost in that upfront burst of bright fruit.  Thus the ageing process is used to tamp down the overt fruitiness and allow the proper shape of the wine to come into focus.  

Even if focus and balance is our ultimate goal, I have always wanted to share what our wine tastes like when truly young.  The immense acid and tannin structure of our reds make them especially difficult to enjoy when brand new as all the elements tend to over expose the palate and I even have trouble discerning exactly what their path will be.  But with our Vin Gris program, the fruit and acidity of youth is a perfect entry into showing what is at the core of our wines.  I decided in 2020 to start bottling a Harvest Rose early each November for just this reason.  Like any farmer, you want others to taste straight off the tree or vine before any vitality in flavor is robbed by time.  So this wine is meant entirely to be consumed immediately, aging is contrary to the point of showcasing our wines in youth.  These wines also act as a physical answer to the question, "So how was this vintage?"  The 2021 Harvest Rose, like most of this harvest, showcases fully ripe fruit with great freshness and edge.  The mild conditions of late summer early fall did not create any raisins thus no pruney character is hinted at in any way.  The bracing acidity demonstrates the backbone these wines contain hinting at age worthy wines, they won't necessarily improve greatly with time, but they will not fall apart either and should remain gracefull for many years.  These are exciting wines, and yes, they need some time in my opinion to settle down.  The tannin extraction on the reds was a bit over the top so it will be quite a while before I let anyone else have a taste.  But with this bottling of Harvest Rose, I would like to peel back the curtain and give you a hint of what is to come!

Cheers, 
Jason

Quite a few years back, I was in a small bar on New Year's Eve overly enjoying the night while being entertained by a bunch of friends and thier one night only formations of Fleetwood Mac and Rolling Stones tribute bands.  Since these were one off shows, the song books was limited to mainly the big hits, but that didn't stop me from around mdnight repeatedly demanding my favorite Stones song "Shattered" be played.  It came to not avail, but that night and that song always pop into my mind while walking around our Estate Grenache in late spring.  Grenache has quite a few quirks that make it stick out in the world of viticulture.  Some of these are grape clusters the size of your head.  The fact that sunshine acutally makes the grapes skins lose color.  But the one that makes things most exciting is its propensity to shatter.  

Like I said, I'm not the most viticulturally knowledgable person out there, and I can't truly speak for Grenache, but I think I like its approach to the grape game.  Some vines are perfectionists (looking at you Pinot Noir) and seem toconcentrate on producing just a small amount of these beautiful tight little clusters of berries.  Like a parent with an one child that devotes all thier attention to.  Not Grenache, it seems to go more with the all in approach.  Just produce as many flowers as possible and who cares if most of them don't make it, enough will to keep things moving.  Thus the giant clusters and the shatter.  Shatter is the failure of the flower to properly polinate, so it shrivels on the vine and never becomes a grape.  Here is an amatuer photo I took this morning of a post shatter cluster.

      All that brown you see are the shattered dreams of a flower that never will grow to be a grape.  Yes, I know, it can be a bit sad, and let me tell you, it can get really sad some years as you can lose around 80% of your crop to a heatwave or cold snap during flowering.  But this year, the spring temperatures were extremely mild and created an atmosphere that was perfect for Grenache flower pollination, so only about 3-5% of the clusters look like that.  The vast majority of the clusters look like this after fruit set.

  Those little green berries will swell a bit more each day leading toward veraison, the final step of the ripening process.  When all is said in done, this looks to be a pretty big yield of Grenache coming.  That is always exciting, as having excess availability of Estate Grenache opens up the possibility of picking a decent amount of it early for whole cluster pressing and forming a more perfect base for our Estate Vin Gris (and maybe even the Harvest Rose).  Of course that all reamains to be seen as it looks to be around 105 here 5 days from now so you never know what nature has in store.  But so far, things are looking promising for Grenache in 2021.