Vintage: 2020
Varieties: 67% Mission (Somer’s Vineyard, Mokelumne River AVA, Lodi, CA), 33% Petite Sirah (Jag’s Vineyard Mokelumne River AVA, Lodi, CA)
Alcohol: 12.5% by vol

Notes
Free Your Soul is a natural solution to the limitations of the Mission grape and an evolution of California’s first wine.

Forgive us for saying so, but the Mission grape has a lot of shortcomings! Next-door neighbor-grape Petite Sirah is a bit of a hoarder, well stocked with wine attributes. A small blending fraction of Petite can lend a lot of structure, extract, and yeast nutrient to an anemic Mission Cuveé. Our goal was to update a classic wine- California’s first wine, born of religious ceremony, we much prefer a strategic co-fermentation to the yeast nutrient and acid additions that are often employed to address the shortcomings of Mission grapes.

Additional
Petite Sirah was picked on September 9 at 21.5° brix and whole clusters were dumped into an open-top fermentor.

Mission was picked on September 11 at 20.4° brix, de-stemmed, and dumped into the fermentor on top of the Petite Sirah.

Vigorous foot-treading and soft punch-downs were employed to best mimic classic winemaking techniques. The wine was pressed to neutral French Oak barriques as soon as the tannin pickup (from Petite Sirah) gained traction.

The wine was aged 6 months in barrel and bottled unfined and unfiltered, with 15 ppm sulfur (kmbs) added at bottling.