Our friend Tegan Passalacqua helped us to find a brilliant new vineyard to replace the Farina vineyard that we used for the Prince and LSB for 15 years-- we lost the vineyard when we could not make wine from it in the pandemic. He showed us the Oleta Vineyard-- a remarkable own-rooted Sauvignon Blanc vineyard at 3000 feet of altitude, in the Sierra Foothills. The Sauvignon is planted on granite talus, the rocky tailings of a 19th-century gold mine at the top of the hill. We knew the vineyard was good, mayb even great-- but could it make these wines?
Yes. This new vineyard excels. In order to make this wine, we foot treaded the clusters and pressed them gently-- no skin contact. We added SO2 to the juice and fermented the wine in a single 500 liter neutral oak puncheon. We kept the puncheon topped and racked the wine only once-- for bottling in March of 2026.
The resulting wine is strong, idiosyncratic, and a worthy successor to our many Friulano-admiring wines of 2000s. Just as the Prince draws inspiration from the Oslavian wines of Radikon and Gravner, this different expression of Sauvignon looks to Buttrio and the clear, powerful, wines of Miani.
We knew this vineyard was good, so we doubled our take in 2025 and made 5 barrels of wine.
When Chiara Pepe came to prune Lone Wolf, she insisted on a quick visit to the winery to taste what we were up to. This was the second wine that we tasted. When I put it in her glass, she tasted and said, "Pecorino?" I could not have been more flattered.
We used most of the Sauvignon for this bottling but also kept out one barrel for Chiara's Riserva and put about a barrel into the Castello dell'Ovest Ribolla blend.
In the end, we made 600 bottles of this wine, thus its inviting price.
