Las Jaras Wines Sonoma Mountain Cabernet Sauvignon

"We hand-picked the fruit, then destemmed the grapes destemmed into a single 4-ton tank for fermentation. We warmed the tank to encourage native fermentation and punched down the must once a day until it started fermenting, at which point we moved to two light punchdowns per day and turned off the heat. Later in the fermentation, we avoided punching down to prevent over-extraction. We drained the wine at dryness and pressed the skins in a horizontal press. We kept only the free-drain wine for this bottling and aged it in four 255-liter Bordeaux barrels, three of which were new. It is hard to believe there is 75% new oak on this wine; you certainly can’t smell or taste it. We aged the wine for 22 months in a cool room where the wines underwent native malo-lactic fermentation. We racked the barrels about a month before bottling and then back to clean barrels. We racked again a few days before bottling and the wine was limpid. This is our method of creating wines that are clean without being filtered. We bottled unfiltered and un-fined."