2020 ODBTrousseau Noir

A mushroom, forest floor base with pops of tomato leaf, sour watermelon candies and prosciutto. 

The Trousseau vines in our vineyard were propagated from a clonal selection with a long history in the Sierra Foothills. Prior to Prohibition, UC Davis ran an agricultural station in the town of Jackson in which vines commonly found in the Foothills at that time were studied. The Jackson Research Station was abandoned in the 1920s; in 1989 cuttings of surviving vines were recovered and brought back to the Viticulture Department at the university. Among them was Trousseau, which we have brought back to the Foothills in our vineyard after a nearly a century-long absence from the region.

Our Trousseau was hand-picked; its whole clusters received a vigorous pigeage prior to being placed into a small open-top fermenter with 100% stem inclusion. The must received pigeage and/or punchdowns twice daily; fermentation lasted 10 days at which time the wine was pressed down to 227L barriques of neutral oak. The wine was racked off of its lees at 12 months and saw a total of 14 months elevage. Bottled unfined and unfiltered. As with all Forlorn Hope wines, no new oak is utilized, and nothing was added to the must or wine (no cultured yeast, ML bacteria, water, tartaric acid, enzymes, nutrients, etc) with the exception of minimal effective SO2.