Photographing The River
TASTING NOTES: “One of three wines we produce from the famed Brosseau Vineyard in the Chalone appellation. High in the Gavilans, the site is known for large deposits of granite and limestone that result in extremely low yields. We are incredibly happy with the 2024 Syrah/Grenache. With 50% whole cluster and a moderate maceration, this wine is dark, rich, and powerful, but moderate in alcohol and surprisingly drinkable. We have been working with Bill Brosseau and the certified organic Brosseau Vineyard in the Chalone appellation off and on for a number of years now. The Brosseau wines offer a terroir driven expression of a single site; high elevation, extremely scarce rainfall, and crushed granite, limestone soils. It is said a million times and I try not to be cliché when I’m writing these things, but this is a truly unique site that mixes California weather with soil types that are more common in European vineyards leading to a wine that is at once Californian with fruit and richness, but also mineral and textural in a way that is not common in California. This roughly 50/50 blend of Syrah and Grenache is 50% whole cluster (stems included) fermented and aged in 500L puncheons that were not new, but not old enough yet to be neutral. 2024 was a warm vintage in Chalone producing rich, ripe wines with flavor and depth Both the Syrah and the Grenache were harvested in the middle of September. The final wine sits at 6.0 g/L titratable with a pH of 3.60.” (AbV 12.6%, pH 3.60, TA 6.0 g/L)
VARIETALS: Syrah, Grenache
BARRELS: Not specified.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Folk Machine.
There’s a real paradox baked into that name, and it’s one folklorists have been arguing about since the 1930s. “Folk” is supposed to mean something passed down mouth to mouth, changing a little with every telling — no fixed version, no single author, alive because it keeps mutating. Then along comes the machine: the phonograph, then the reel-to-reel, then Alan Lomax hauling a 300-pound portable disc recorder into the Mississippi Delta and the Appalachian hills for the Library of Congress, trying to pin down thousands of these songs before they drifted any further from whatever they’d started as.
The thing is, the recording didn’t just preserve the folk process — it froze it. Once a song got captured on a disc, that version became the version people learned from, which is a little like photographing a river and calling it the river. Lomax knew this and did it anyway, because the alternative was losing the songs entirely. So “folk machine” isn’t really a contradiction — it’s just an honest description of how oral tradition survived the 20th century at all.
ICYMI, you have two choices:
- Worried Summer heat might get to your wine before your wine gets to you? Order from the sale linked here, and we’ll get it to you at a cooler time of year!
- Want it shipped now? Every package during the summer will have protected temp control ground shipping for much of the country that takes longer but will ensure safe delivery. Expect up to two weeks for delivery. Now through the September 12th offer.
