Lillian roussanne

There is not a tremendous amount of roussanne grown in this country because it is somewhat annoying in its habits. The growers struggle with it because it ripens incredibly late and the winemakers struggle because it ripens incredibly unevenly. Oftentimes, as I approach our roussanne block as we draw closer to harvest, the rest of the vineyard has long ago been picked clean (of syrah, grenache, mourvedre…) but the roussanne will have, on a single vine, one cluster that is green, one yellow, one gold, one amber, one russet and one gnarled with botrytis. It’s hard to know what to do. Were the block bigger, I would pick in passes; going out every six to ten days to gather only the golden clusters. But with only an acre and a half with which to work, if I went out every week to gather the gold, I would come back with enough to ferment in my boot. Instead we let the fruit hang until about 85% of the fruit is perfectly ripe; amber-skinned, seeds deeply brown, and harvest the entire block. At this point we see a range of maturity from pale and flush with acid to leather-skinned and touched with botrytis. To work with the variation with the greatest level of precision, we slow down the sorting table tenfold and collate the fruit by color; first cluster by cluster and then berry by berry, into five different categories: green, yellow, golden, amber and botrysized. The lighter, higher-acid fruit goes directly to the press, as we would handle chardonnay, for ten to eighteen hours. Each of the subsequent selections gets an incresing amount of skin contact, from three to eighteen hours. The challenge is to figure out a way to make a complete and totally gentle extraction of the aromas in the thick-skinned berries and often-present (and welcome) botrytis at the richest end of the spectrum. To this end, we allow the fruit to ferment on the skins for three to five days, gently washing the skins with the juice twice a day, just until the fermentation progresses far enough that the aromatics crack open and rise from the vat. This allows us access to aromas that would never occur were we to go directly to the press and allows us to extract them in the most gentle way. Each of these fractions is barrel fermented seperately and goes through full malo in barrel. The wines remain in barrel, sur lie, for a year before we pull a sample from each the barrels and via a blind blending session, find a cuvée that comes together with the greatest complexity, symmetry and beauty.

The label is a representation of the detail on a butterfly’s wing. We take the image of a butterfly for this wine to reflect the transformation of fruit that was once deeply russet and touched with botrytis to a wine that is lifted, shimmering and fine.

2018 in Santa Barbara county was a year with cool conditions and no heat spikes and the resultant wines are fresh, vibrant and wildly intense. Acidities are, for both the syrah and roussanne, higher and alcohols are lower.

Moderate weather resulted in an extended growing season with no pressures to pick and a very long harvest. The fruit was immaculate but the yields quite small.

Syrah and roussanne both ripen later in the fall, when shorter days result in less heat and sunshine during the final phase of ripening. As such, and especially in cooler vintages, we thinned prodigiously to allow the fruit to gain in concentration and give the vine enough energy to develop flavor in the fruit through the end of the season. The vintage gave rise to wines of particular intensity, crystallinity and verve.

36 cases of 750mL produced
Release date March 1, 2021