DES AMIS = WITH FRIENDS
This is the kind of project that is conceived when wine industry friends get together for fun. We drink a lot of wine, eat a lot of really good food, and decide to make a wine that only other drunk wine geeks would really get excited about.
This is the horribly flawed business plan that led to DES AMIS.
Des Amis "Rosé"
The current release of Des Amis is emblematic of the chaos of the last few years. Since we skipped the last 3 vintages, our "genius" idea was to make this "resurrection" bottling a wholly new wine.
Although we have labeled this wine as rosé, we lie. This is not what you would normally consider still rosé. In the summer of 2020, we
Our first vintage was just Luke and Greg making 300 bottles of 2013 Rosé of Pinot Noir. The vines surrounded a tennis court and small house in Oakville adjacent to the famed To Kolan Vineyard. We were permitted to bring the neglected vines back to health, and they gave us the grapes for free. So yeah...you could say we made To Kolan Vineyard Pinot Noir Rosé, but we're not really allowed to say that. If you had one of those first bottles, then you can die knowing you've lived a full life.
Each year we brought together a different band of wine folks to make Des Amis, so each year is a new expression of creativity and collaboration. We took a break during the pandemic, but now we're testing negative and ready to rosé from the ashes (apologies for the pun).
purchased a 100-acre vineyard in Monterey with 20 acres of ugly Gewürztraminer vines. With the chaos of that year of wildfires, we didn't harvest the grapes, but we pulled off a half ton for fun and we were wowed by the fruit. So in 2021, we decided not to replant.
The weather was perfect that vintage and the vines produced beautiful, complex fruit. We pressed the fruit, then fermented on skins in our cement tanks for 33 days. The wine was removed and held in concrete for 6 months before bottling. The color is a beautiful rusty pink hue, and the Gewürztraminer is gorgeous with a big floral, rose petal nose and wonderful flavors of lychee, grapefruit, and apricot with sophisticated notes of mineral, like wet stones. The texture is rich with a touch of tannin and weight, but bright with acidity. If Lana del Ray could be bottled in liquid form, she would be Des Amis Rosé.
