2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company Lopez Golden Chasselas

Lopez Ranch

Lopez Ranch

2021 Los Angeles River Wine Company Lopez Golden Chasselas Lopez Ranch - LOS ANGELES RIVER WINE COMPANY
$45.00 each
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it is hard to say which is the most amazing vineyard that we work with, but I can tell you that in August of 2021, all of my fascination was devoted to Lopez Palomino.


This is a vineyard that Christina and I had heard about in the Fall of 2019, but we could never find it, nor convince anyone to tell us just where it was. Then, at the end of harvest 2019, Fidel Guerra took us from Maglite to the Palomino, about 15 minutes away. It is on the edge of the amazing, and huge, Lopez Zinfandel vineyard, down a side-street, and somehow we never spotted the golden canes or yellow fruit.


Fidel pruned the vineyard in the winter preceding harvest 2021 and did a beautiful job. MOst of the vineyard is very old-- at least 1912, maybe older. All of it is on its own roots.


Raj and I and three other small wineries harvested as much fruit as we could this year, and all of us cannot wait to make more and more wine from the vineyard in coming years.


Our wine is serious, almost severe. There was no skin-contact, but the wine is still slightly tannic. It is high in acid, with great structure. Not as fierce and wild as the Palominos we have made from Marian farms; much more elegant and sophisticated.

During harvest, we met a man who has worked in the vineyard for 60 years. He referred to the fruit as "Golden Chasselas," not Palomino. Golden Chasselas is what Californians called Palomino in the 19th century when they were planting it-- I have no idea why, and I am not sure if anyone does. It was being planted to make Sherry, so at least some people knew that it was Palomino. There was perhaps a new world sense that everything was not only new



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