Point Break White Table Wine 2020

Type

White

Grape

Ribolla Gialla, Chenin Blanc

Region

Carmel Valley, CA

Value

Environment

Vibe

Spring + Vibrant

Characteristics

Acidity

Body

Umami

Production Notes

Half Ribolla Gialla (Clements Hills) and half Chenin Blanc (Carmel Valley). The Ribolla Gialla is sourced from a 2-acre block in the Il Mio Vigneto Vineyard, fastidiously farmed by Dwight Busalcchi. Part of the larger Lodi AVA, Clements Hills is hot and dry during the day with cool, nocturnal air flowing from the San Francisco Bay-Delta Estuary. The Chenin Blanc is from the magisterial Massa Vineyard in Carmel Valley, a dry-farmed estate that has been certified organic since the early 1980s. At 1200-1500 feet, Massa Vineyard overlooks the Cachagua region, hilly and verdant with deep sandy loam soils that nurture soulful, expressive vines. Both grapes were harvested at 22 Brix and fermented in stainless steel. The wines were aged separately for 8 months in barrel before blending. 12.9% Alc./Vol.

Point Break White Table Wine - 2020

A mood ring for late summer nights, Point Break translates texture into heart-thumping emotion. Dreamy, sunlit flavors like dried mandarin peel and desert blooms.

For Josh Hammerling, sparkling wine is more than an extravagant party favor. It's a front-row seat to California’s most exquisite and rugged terrain — specifically, its coast. It’s also, it turns out, a nearly impossible endeavor within the confines of American capitalism. Sparkling wine — even low-intervention sparkling wine — is highly labor intensive. (There’s a reason, aside from the enormous marketing spends, that champagne is so expensive). Josh overcomes such obstacles with fierce optimism, and the deranged stamina of a long-haul truck driver. Visit him in winter (when other winemakers are catching up on email and dusting off their Netflix accounts) and you'll find him hand-disgorging bottles by the thousand. Josh moved to Berkeley in 2017, precipitating back-to-back internships at Broc Cellars and Donkey & Goat — a crash course in natural winemaking that would kick-start his career. It also opened his eyes to California sparkling wine's untapped potential. A year later he started Blue Ox (which would later become Hammerling Wines). The winery's Berkeley address not only placed him within a community of like-minded urban wine pioneers, it granted him access to abundant sources of organically farmed, coastal vineyards, from Mendocino to Monterey Bay.