Matthiasson Bengier Ribolla Gialla 2022

Tasting Note: The last time we made this wine as a separate bottling was back in 2020. This fruit typically all goes into our Napa Valley White Wine blend (since 2005), but occasionally we get a generous enough crop of fruit to also bottle some by itself, as a single vineyard/single varietal wine. Ribolla Gialla originates in the Friuli region of Italy and across the border in Slovenia. Its earliest known mention was in the Pope’s paperwork managing a dispute between the Bishop of Trieste and a monastery in Venezia in 1296. Back then it would have been skin-fermented like a red wine, and we do that too with our Matthiasson Vineyard estate-grown fruit, but this wine was made in a “modern” method (the past few hundred years) of pressing the fruit and fermenting the juice separately in barrels. The wine is pure slate and minerals. There is no fruitiness at all, instead there is a sense of clean cold stone. The texture has the tannic structure that Ribolla is known for, and that makes it so great with food. It is the perfect oyster wine, but also great with salads as well as rich pork or chicken dishes.

Winemaking: The wine is 100 percent Ribolla Gialla from our home vineyard. The fruit was very lightly whole-cluster pressed and then barrel fermented in completely neutral barrels. It was aged on its lees, with no stirring, until bottling. To preserve all of the acidity the wine was prevented from going through malo-lactic fermentation. After ten months of barrel aging, the wine was filtered to prevent further malolactic fermentation, and then bottled. The pH is 3.47, the TA is 6.2, and the alcohol is 13.0%. 95 cases produced.

Alcohol: 13.0%

Variety: Ribolla Gialla

Region: Napa Valley, Oak Knoll AVA, USA