Hello from the Sebastopol Hills. You’re seeing a new wine in this year’s Fall shipment!
As the winemaker, it’s my pleasure to discuss how this wine came to be, and what you can expect from it in the context of the Kanzler Vineyards portfolio.
2019 was an excellent year for Pinot Noir. Mother Nature blessed us with a very wet and snowy winter, which led to happy and healthy grapevines in spring. We had near-average yields, near-average pick dates, and moderate weather during summer and harvest. The resulting wines are balanced, unique, and just very, very yummy. Hopefully you’ve enjoyed some of the already released 2019s and have more aging in your cellar, as these wines are still gaining.
Since we “overvintage” all of our Pinot Noir (the previous vintage is still in barrel while the new vintage is being harvested) our 2019 wines were safely resting when the freak lightning storm and resulting wildfires struck northern California in August of 2020.
With the 2020 vintage suddenly in an unknown degree of peril, we weren’t sure whether we would have even one wine to send our members in Fall 2022. So we looked at our stable of 2019 wines, which had not yet been blended and bottled, and asked ourselves if there was another wine this vintage could give us. The answer was yes, and the result is the 2019 One Fifteen Pinot Noir, a very distinctive and expressive wine crafted from a single clone on the estate vineyard.
During our approximately 14-month aging process, I always taste every single barrel of wine several times, and in 2019 something stood out about the 115 clone. Moreover, we work with two vineyard blocks of 115 at the estate, on two different rootstocks, so we get a lot of flavor, texture and aromatic diversity from this single clone. The blocks are picked at different times, at different ripeness levels, and receive different oak and whole cluster treatments.
The 115 blocks are in the northeast part of the vineyard. From there you can see the neighbor’s apple orchard, as well as the tangled line of trees that demarcate the creek at the base of our slope. Clone 115 is known for producing small “hand grenade” clusters with tight berry spacing. We look for blue fruits, warm spices, and mid-palate depth. This clone can be more shy in the front of the mouth, instead setting up camp in the mid-palate where flavors gather and linger.
It’s extremely important to me that each wine we make has an individual character. I didn’t want the One Fifteen to mimic our Estate Reserve bottling. Tasting the wines side-by-side, they are very much their own personalities, and show an interesting juxtaposition within Kanzler Estate. The One Fifteen is less acidic, uses less new French oak, carries a lower alcohol content, and has about double the proportion of whole cluster inclusion. The resulting wine is softer and more approachable than the bolder and darker Estate Reserve, while still packing in tons of flavor. It has a seamless texture that caresses the palate, lots of spicy aromatics, and an overall more ethereal vibe compared to the assertive Reserve.
While One Fifteen was born out of the immense difficulty of the 2020 vintage, we’re extremely pleased that we could craft and bottle it and show the quality of the 2019 vintage through a different lens. Moreover, while the 2020 vintage was certainly the most challenging in decades, it turned out that we made excellent wines with the limited grapes we had to work with. And we were able to produce just enough wine to take care of our Club members and a few other longtime collectors. We are extremely proud of the results and know that the 2020 Estate Reserve will be a wine you’ll love for years to come.
If y’all keep drinking them, we’ll keep making them.
ALEX KANZLER
Winemaker
