Nose
Refreshingly dry and crisp, our 2017 Malbec Ros offers an elegant, pale-rose color and delightful aromas of berry, rose water and fragrant Turkish delight candy.
Palate
A mouthwatering, yet delicate and soft nature persists, unfolding to savory mineral undertones, suggesting a slight flintiness. This is a wine best enjoyed when it’s young and fresh.
Growing Conditions
Overall, 2017 proved to be a very memorable vintage with slightly smaller yields but exceptional quality. A brief period of warmer than usual temperatures occurred during Labor Day weekend which accelerated the harvest in some areas but was perfect for ripening the fruit in the Napa Valley. Temperatures subsided just when we needed and the fruit was allowed to mature and ripen perfectly on the vines before harvest officially began.
Harvest
2017 will be remembered as an intense and unpredictable harvest but one of tremendous quality, with wines showing great flavor intensity, perfect ripening and maturity, lovely balance and complexity.
Winemaking
We use two different techniques to create our Malbec Rosé. We hand harvested the Malbec grapes from our sister estate BV Ranch #12 and immediately pressed the whole clusters. These grapes were picked at earlier maturity levels than they would be for a red wine, in order to preserve freshness and fruit-forward character. The second technique, called saignée, is the drawing off of a portion of the vibrant pink juice from the actual fermentation tank for our Provenance Malbec, thus concentrating that full-bodied red wine. These grapes were harvested from the Peppone Vineyard at higher maturity, which gave our Malbec Rosé its riper, richer flavors. Both vineyard-lots of juice were then cool-fermented in stainless steel tanks like a white wine until dry.
Aging
Aging sur lie (on the yeast) with bâtonnage (stirring) to develop the silky texture and add yeasty complexity to the aromas.
