2004 Viento Vineyard White Riesling, Monterey
Vineyards
The grapes for this wine were grown on a windy terrace overlooking Arroyo Seco to the north and the fertile plain of the great Salinas Valley below. Given its unique hillside perch, the vines of this vineyard experience low soil fertility and a paucity of water causing yields to fall to the 3-4 tons per acre range. Soil structure is uniform across the terrace with a gravelly-loam comprising the floor and shale making up the supporting structure of the hillside. Each afternoon, cooling winds blow down from the inlet at Elkhorn Slough to take the edge off of the day's heat and allow for very uniform and slow ripening of the grapes. These winds for which the vineyard is named are the key to the coolness of the meso-climate. Planted to a unique clone yielding especially small berries, these Riesling grapes display incredible varietal intensity.
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In the Winery
The grapes were harvested by hand in mid-October 2004. Yields were average, 3.0-3.5 tons per acre. Arriving at the winery, we whole-cluster pressed the grapes using a gentle bladder press, cold-settled the juice for 30 hours and then began a very cold fermentation lasting over 3 months. A small percentage of the wine was barreled in new French oak, and like its counterpart in stainless steel, inoculated with the Steinberg-Geisenheim strain of yeast. Fermented quite dry at 0.8% residual sugar, the wine was bottled in early April of 2005.
