It is an amazing time: we have now survived two years in the plague, made wine in a parking lot, and now are about to bottle our third vintage of Los Angeles wines. You cannot visit us yet, but you may purchase and taste the wines.
Our third vintage. So exciting, and so much new:
This year, we harvested fruit from seven old-vine vineyards in Southern California, all of them planted on their own roots before 1918. We discovered one new vineyard of crucial importance, and gained access to three more grape sources from vineyards we had known about before but had not been able to work with. The result of this is five new wines this year!
The drought was hard on all of our vineyards and yields were down everywhere. We made only a quarter as much Lone Wolf in 2021 compared to 2022, and about half as much Maglite. On the other hand, there are three really good things to report: as much as the pandemic presented difficulties to all of us, there was not the same ever-present sense of uncertainty and dread as there was in 2020. You can feel this in the wines: they are much lighter and more joyous this year. No joke. And there was no weeks-long heatwave. We made wine in beautiful warm weather, not in opppressive 100-degree heat. And lastly, we were joined by many more colleagues this year and the tribe of serious Los Angeles winemakers is growing.
2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company F700 Reserve
The Core
1 bottle each of the 6 core wines
2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company Phulax
Gateway Vineyard
2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company Lone Wolf Blanc
Munoa Ranch
2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company Lopez Red
Lopez Ranch
As often as possible, we host you. We pour wines. Rarely ours alone. How can we welcome you without the presence of our friends?
A litte party
Saturday May 7 at 5 PM
The Return of the Scythians
Saturday April 2 at 7:00 PM
We have just begun bottling Magnums again after a hiatus of several years. We have 25 bottles from the 2021 harvest newly available.
It is so exciting to offer these wines. Our second vintage. A plague vintage. With 115 degree days in the vineyard, on the crushpad, enveloping the fermentations. We worked with such joy and innocence, almost without equipment, but with so much loving collaboration from a community of friends.
When it was not clear that we could complete harvest, I turned to our legion of supporters and asked them to take a chance and purchase and pay for wine, before some of it had even been harvested. They flocked to us and bought enough wine to allow us to complete everything, and now the fruit is all harvested, the wine has all fermented, and the wines are ready to bottle.
We made 12 wines this year. We are releasing one bottle of each wine to these supporters. One hundred bottles for one hundred allies. We have only enough of all twelve wines to offer twelve more 12-bottle packages. First come.
We are now offering the remaining bottles, one by one.
2019 FTPC-C
kirschenmann ranch
2020 Los Angeles River Wine Company Disco Essence
2020 Los Angeles River Wine Company Phulax
Gateway Vineyard
2020 Los Angeles River Wine Company Lone Wolf Pet Cemetery
Bob Munoa Ranch
These the wines that we made in Napa in 2018 and 2019 while we were consumed with founding the Los Angeles River Wine Company. I did not give the wines the attention that they deserved in 2018 and 2019, and during the pandemic year of 2020, I alternated between forgetting about them and being afraid of them.
I finally tasted the wines in April of 2021 and they are absolutely brilliant, the best two vintages of wine we have ever made. How strange and unexpected.
Please note that there is a 20% discount on all orders of 12 bottles or more-- mix and match or whole cases.
Three wines from 2018, achored by The Sylphs
2015 Blowout Rosé
A California Sparkling Wine
We are so honored and excited to offer this oil again this year.
The Tenbrinks planted olives in the field opposite the winery before they built the winery in 2007-- 105 trees, from 7 different cultivars. They had in mind the polyculture of their families in Italy, where the terroir of grape growing always also encouraged the cultivation of olives. I have marveled in the past at the oils of Quintarelli, Cornelissen, Paolo Bea, Occhipinti and Clos Mogador in Priorat. This is the dream of a winemaker in a Mediterranean climate: to be able to offer an oil from an orchard of the same quality as his vineyards.
The harvest this year was very late and very plentiful. We began picking on October 22 and have picked on 3 days already, and anticipate on more pick, from the very spicy Koroneiki olives.
We have always milled the different harvests separately. For the first time ever, we have kept the millings separate and will bottle them separately.
The oil is dense and slightly pearlescent; it has been settled, but is unfined and unfiltered. Its freshness is so powerful right now-- you will want to sip it right away. But it will keep easily for a year or more.
We will offer only 225 bottles of these oils in total.
We have accomplished the daring and difficult Futurist aim of forcing bubbles into still wine. Blowout is all about speed, anticipation, audacity: it is a Sparkling Wine bottled and initially released only months after harvest and fermentation. There was no patience in the making-- or consumption-- of Blowout.
And then-- the labels stopped sticking to the bottles. We could not figure out a solution; in the face of so much more to do, we gave up. And let the unlabeled wine age.
Now, in 2021, we have tasted the wine again and it is delicious. I designed new labels, ones that stuck this time. We now release the wine again.
2015 Blowout Rosé
A California Sparkling Wine
2015 blowout rosé 3 pack
2015 blowout rosé 6 pack
2015 blowout rosé-- a full case!
