THE O.G. | Grenache Noir | Carbonicly Fermented

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THE O.G. | Grenache Noir | Carbonicly Fermented

$337.00

Grenache Noir Carbonicly Fermented
Estate Grown
Windmill Ranch
Ballard Canyon AVA
2014 | Picked By Family
2017 | Put To Bottle
2017 - 2038 | Enjoy

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O.G. Gilbert Saarloos

Winemaking has become a pretty exact science these days. You can use science pretty much every step of the way to satisfy your OCD by knowing every little scientific chemical transformation that is taking place. 
But since that has become so safe we decided to go O.G. and make it the old-fashioned way, natually, and completely blind. 

The working title of this wine was CarBomb in the winery. 
Way back in 2014 we took some of our Grenache Noir packed it into a tank and pressurized it with Carbon Dioxide. Then we just left it alone, only checking it to make sure it still was under pressure. I am not going to lie, having an expensive tank full of grapes we farmed for an entire year, in pressurized gas sitting in the corner is a bit unnerving. Like waiting for a firecracker to explode. The Tank has no windows, no way of checking the fermentation, just the Schrödinger's cat of winemaking. (Yes I just described a winemaking process as an allegory to Copenhagen's interpretation of quantum mechanics ) 
You just have this Faith that each berry is fermenting inside of itself. 
 Then when you "think" fermentation is complete you empty the tank and boom the tastiest easy drinking wine comes out the other side. It is like making toast, you put bread in, and toast comes out. 
No one knows how that happens. NO ONE KNOWS.

When it came time to name this beauty, this photo of Grandpa Saarloos sitting on the hood of his freshly waxed car, with all the confidence in the world seems fitting. 
THE O.G.

It only took us 5 years to release it. (secretly we have been drinking it ourselves like it is going out of style)



More Nerdy Stuff Below About What We Did. 

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Carbonic maceration is a winemaking technique, often associated with the French wine region of Beaujolais, in which whole grapes are fermented in a carbon dioxide rich environment before crushing. Conventional alcoholic fermentation involves crushing the grapes to free the juice and pulp from the skin with yeast serving to convert sugar into ethanol. Carbonic maceration ferments most of the juice while it is still inside the grape, although grapes at the bottom of the vessel are crushed by gravity and undergo conventional fermentation. The resulting wine is fruity with very low tannins. 
During carbonic maceration, an anaerobic environment is created by pumping carbon dioxide into a sealed container filled with whole grape clusters. The carbon dioxide gas permeates through the grape skins and begins to stimulate fermentation at an intracellular level. The entire process takes place inside each single, intact berry.