These first wines are wines of serendipity and joy for us. We’re thrilled to share them with you, and even happier to call these our wines, vineyards, and growers. Though surely it must be the other way around. These wines mean the world to us and are exactly the wines we set out to make when we launched into this void, without even knowing the direction we’d take.
2015 GRIFFIN’S LAIR SYRAH
It started with a ton of Griffin’s Lair Syrah in 2015. Before the start of harvest Morgan received word that there were a few rows of Syrah available at this mind-bogglingly amazing vineyard in the Petaluma Gap. Joan and Jim Griffin have a reputation as committed growers, tuned very precisely to the frequency of their site, and the vineyard sits bravely on a wind-battered, north-facing hillside in the Petaluma River valley. It was one of my favorite vineyards, and the winemakers who’ve worked with the fruit through the years – Pax, Duncan and Nathan at Arnot Roberts, and Morgan at Bedrock – are huge sources of inspiration to me. I was salivating. Being the patron saint of our lives that he is, Morgan suggested to Joan and Jim that they sell the grapes to us. And the first Desire Lines wine was born, though for the first two years of its life, we fondly called it the “Cody and Emily Wine” and the “Wine Name TBD.”
The wine was everything we hoped for – at once dense and yet lithe, soaringly aromatic, inspired by the traditional Cote Rotie and St-Joseph that we adore. Vintage 2015 started early with an unusually dry and warm spring, as early as any vintage in recent memory. After four years of extreme drought conditions, snowpack in the Sierra Nevada was at its lowest level in 500 years. Vines were tired and yields were down, in part because of a long bloom period that set unevenly. A dry heat spell over the Labor Day weekend concentrated the fruit on the vine, yielding a rich wine that retains freshness.
The wine fermented un-inoculated with 50% whole cluster and a submerged cap through the first half of fermentation, pressed off just short of dryness, and put down to neutral large format barrels for 15 months before bottling.The wine tastes unmistakably like Griffin’s Lair, suffused with cherry, black tea, and bacon fat, all of which are cast in high relief by the cap submersion. We’re decanting this at home for at least 30 minutes, and are excited to watch this evolve in bottle for many years to come.
2016 COLE RANCH RIESLING
In 2016, fate struck us once again in the rugged mountains of Mendocino County. Our feet, it seemed, were leading us down a path towards a fledging wine brand.
Riesling was my first wine love; I’d probably be working in a cubicle somewhere were it not for Terry Theise’s Reading Between the Wines and the ready availability of the Skurnik portfolio in upstate New York. Riesling provided the door into the ethereal, into wines that tasted like mineral water, flowers and citrus, and of somewhere. This, along with my lack of enthusiasm at the way my case interviews were going for prospective management consulting jobs, propelled me from the East Coast to the Gold Coast in a matter of months. I long harbored a desire to make Riesling, if only to drink my own stash, but thought the pickings of great Riesling vineyards slim (if nonexistent) in California.
It was a firm and ill-founded dogma, and experience opened my eyes. Cole Ranch had been on my radar, and in the middle of harvest craziness I heard that the vineyard had changed hands and wondered who would take the fruit. With a rare Saturday off, I convinced Em to drive the two hours up to Mendocino with me, armed with a few business cards and trove of cautious optimism. We drove up Highway 253 and pulled over to peek at the vineyard, looking for picking bins to give us a sense of who was buying the fruit. After some quick marital negotiating and a panicked moment rummaging around the car for a pen, I scrawled out a note on our paper lunch sack and binder-clipped it to the fence with my business card. (Em is still proud that her car-hoarding tendencies provided us the tools to succeed in that moment).
Two days later I got the call, and another week later we were in possession of a couple tons of beautiful Riesling. For a second time, we’d stumbled onto an utterly compelling vineyard and wine. The Riesling vines were planted at Cole Ranch in 1973 on St. George rootstock, head-trained and dry-farmed. The vineyard sits in a narrow valley in the mountains between Boonville and Ukiah. The soils warm up late in the spring, the valley tends to stay shaded by the sharp mountain ridges above, and temperatures plummet at night as cool air flows downhill into the vineyard. The temperature the morning of the pick was below freezing before sunrise; it’s an unpleasant prospect when the alarm rings at 3 AM.
The grapes tasted fantastic – perfectly ripe at a cool 21 brix and a pH below 3.0. Like the German Grosses Gewächs Rieslings that we love so much, the wine is a study in tension and richness, with a few grams of residual sugar retained to balance the abundant acidity. This is dry Riesling rendered in pointillist detail, shimmering and limpid.
So there you have it: the first two wines in the Desire Lines Release. We hope you don’t get sick of hearing this from us – but THANK YOU. Thank you for joining our mailing list; thank you for reading this verbosity; thank you for supporting us. We couldn’t be more grateful for the blessings that have come our way since we moved out here almost seven years ago—beyond what we could have asked or imagined.
Love,
Cody & Emily
