NV La Géante

an esoteric white blend

an esoteric white blend

NV La Géante an esoteric white blend - LOS ANGELES RIVER WINE COMPANY
$20.00 each
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This wine has many origins— to a great degree in emulation of other wines that we admire very much,
but also to some degree in necessity and accident. It began as an attempt to create a successor to the
2014 Miss Texas blend, but we pretty much forgot to bottle the wine, and then had to confront a big
vessel of neglected wine. This was in the fall of 2016, so we simply began adding 2016 wine to the
blend, to refresh and improve it, and we did so only guessing at what the result would be. In this respect,
we were inspired by nobody we knew. But we also had an idea in the back of our mind— a solera
project, that we would add wine to every year. And then Nate Ready of Hiyu came out with a serious and
absolutely stunning solera red wine, and I was heartened and impressed with his courage and originality
— and it gave me the courage in turn to continue on our path. So in 2017 we added more wine, and by
Fall of 2018, we had a complex white wine blend that was ready to bottle. It has a fair amount of skin-
contact SB in it from various vintages of the Prince, and the wine needed both time and air to meld and
become beautiful.

The solera had the following composition at bottling in the Fall of 2018:
40% 2016

34% 2015

26% 2017


At bottling, we took away 60% of the wine, and will replace some of it with a half-portion of 2018 wine.
This will lead to a smaller bottling next year, but we wanted to get out a fair amount of the first version,
and to make sure that we add a proper portion of new wine.


The wine is rich and powerful and well-structured. It is surprisingly fresh for a wine with so much age and
so much skin contact. It has no varietal character at all; nor does it in any way seem like a solera wine. In
the end, it is somehow one thing that does not reveal its parts.


The origin of name lies in a double act of emulation: in the Spring of 2018, Christopher Nicolson and I
composed a very powerful wine of Kongsgaardian stature from Chardonnay that he and I had made at
the Red Hook Winery. We gave it the name “La Ge?ante,” after the title of a poem of voluptuousness and
power by Baudelaire.










Technical Information
  • Appellation california