Stall. Settle. Begin.
TASTING NOTES: “On the nose is a pretty bouquet of lime, lemon and floral character. Behind it are subtle tropical fruit notes combined with a nice mineral/wet rock character. The palate is light, bright and crisp with a pleasant plumpness on the attack that doesn’t overwhelm the palate but provides some weight and texture.” (AbV 12.30%, pH 3.4, TA 5.8 g/L)
VARIETALS: 100% Sauvignon Blanc
BARRELS: 3 months in stainless steel tank
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Stabulation.
No, not a stabbing — stabulation, the winemaking technique where juice is chilled down near freezing and left to settle before fermentation. It sounds like something you’d find in a medieval bestiary. “The stabulation of the noble grape.” It also sounds like it could describe what happens to livestock in a barn, which is basically what it means etymologically: stabulum in Latin is a stall, a stable, a place where animals stand around doing nothing for a while. So the grape juice goes into its little stall, wrapped in cold, and just… hangs out. Settles its thoughts. Let the gross lees fall where they may.
The stabulation here lasted three weeks, which puts it in the company of a remarkable number of culturally significant three-week periods. Napoleon’s Hundred Days started with roughly three weeks of marching. The Beatles recorded Please Please Me in one day, but they’d been rehearsing the songs for — okay, that one doesn’t hold up. The point is three weeks is a specific, deliberate amount of time. Long enough to mean something. Short enough to feel intentional rather than forgotten.
I find I’m charmed by any winemaking step that is essentially “wait, but cold.” There’s a patience baked into it (chilled into it?) that runs counter to how most of modern life operates. Cool the juice. Rack off the lees. Then we begin. The wine didn’t actually do anything during stabulation. That’s kind of the whole point.
