Mitsuko's Vineyard Chardonnay
		Cabernet Sauvignon
		Mitsuko's Vineyard Merlot
		Mitsuko's Vineyard Pinot Noir
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Wine Notes

Mitsuko's Vineyard Chardonnay

With "feet of clay" our meticulously tended vines issue forth, each year, from restrained yields, this perfumed and intensely concentrated Chardonnay. The vines shiver through foggy mornings waiting for the afternoon sun to warm them sufficiently to ripen their bounty. When autumn arrives, each bunch is hand-picked at night to preserve its freshness and delivered cool and healthy to the winery. Here we eschew destemming and crushing in favor of whole cluster pressing, a laborious but extremely gentle process of separating the juice from its skins, avoiding the bitter tannins that might otherwise be extracted. The freshly squeezed juice is then drained to French oak barrels where it will remain until assemblage and bottling some 10 months later.

No yeasts are added to the new juice as we prefer the complexity and individuality provided by the indigenous, or "wild" yeasts that convert the sugar to alcohol. The secondary fermentation, converting the hard malic acid to the softer lactic, is completed by a cultured bacteria imported from Burgundy. Although native malo-lactic fermentation is an option, we find it lends too much bitterness to the wine, and we prefer our Chardonnay to retain its unique purity of fruit, and long, cleansing finish.

To broaden the palate and mouth-feel of the wine we employ battonage, a technique that involves stirring the yeast lees in each barrel on a regular basis. By keeping the lees in suspension the wine's pure fruit character is guarded against oxidation and the wine seems to put on some weight, or "fatness," as well as being less astringent and sharp. But finally, it is the vineyard's inherent aromatic and taste persona, such as nectarine, white peach and acacia blossom that infuses the wine with its distinctive flavors. To fully capture these traits we decant the wine off its lees and, after a gentle clay fining, we bottle the wine unfiltered.

These simple, traditional and time-honored techniques are our way of delivering the purest expression of Mitsuko's Vineyard Chardonnay, capturing in bottle the dramatic nuances intrinsic to each vintage.

Cabernet Sauvignon

Clos Pegase grows Cabernet Sauvignon at all three of its estate vineyards, though the newest parcel, a high density planting at the winery named Applebone, is not yet in production. The principal sources will continue to be our 40-acre Palisades Vineyard, nestled at the base of Mt. St. Helena, and the spare plot known as Graveyard Hill in Carneros. Both these vineyards, despite their dramatic climatic differences, share well-drained, rocky terrain that stress and concentrate the resulting berries.

Little effort is required to extract the deep black color and lush tannin structure that are the birthright of these wines. Vinified with natural yeast, and left to macerate for several weeks on their dense skins, the resulting wines reflect the opulence and fine minerality that derives from their light yielding and exacting soils. After a long fermentation with the skin and seeds, the free-run juice is extracted and run off into small French barriques for two years or more of cellar age.

The press wines are collected and sold in bulk, as the long maceration renders these wines too rustic to be blended into our Clos Pegase bottlings. Smaller aliquots of Cabernet Franc, Petit Verdot, Malbec and Merlot from our estate vineyards may be judiciously added to spice the palate or perfume the aromatic profile of our Cabernet blends.

Ultimately, it is the alchemy of blending that is the signature of these wines. We are blessed in being able to blend richly tannic, naturally acidic Cabernet from Graveyard Hill with the preciously aromatic, but shorter, broader-textured wines of Palisades. Here, the sum is truly greater than the parts. Flush with black cherry, cassis, mocha, chocolate and dried flowers wedded to silky, mouth-coating tannins, our Cabernet is indeed an expression of the best that Napa Valley has to offer.

Mitsuko's Vineyard Merlot

In Bordeaux, where many feel Merlot reaches its greatest expression, it is grown almost exclusively in those soils and microclimates that have proven too cool to ripen Cabernet Sauvignon, the latter being considered of greater concentration, tannin and keeping quality. With the recent phylloxera epidemic forcing wholesale replanting of much of the Napa Valley, the same trend in thought has inspired us to seek the cooler reaches of Napa when planting Merlot.

This achieves two ends: First we save valuable land for the venerable Cabernet vines; and second, we return Merlot to its more native expression, one of pure red fruits and lightly, herbal, earthy tones as opposed to the more ponderous, jammy style one evokes in warmer climates. Mitsuko's Vineyard, in Carneros, provides us with clay slopes of varying aspect to try our hand at just such a classical style.

Our Merlot is harvested quite late, relative to other sites in the Valley, as we await the subtle evolution of fruit and acid balance that is so difficult to precisely achieve in Merlot. Once the fruit is picked by hand, we gently destem the berries and transfer them to our fermentation tanks. Many of the lots undergo a saignée -- the "bleeding off" of a small percentage of the uncolored juice to concentrate the remaining must prior to fermentation. (Think of a chef reducing a sauce by removing some of the excess liquid).

Typically the fruit is macerated cold for 5 to 7 days, where much of the color and primary fruit flavors steep into the must. The fermentations are completely native, and the wines are often pressed at dryness, with only a brief period of extended skin contact.

Once pressed the wine is sent to French oak barrels, about 40% new, for malolactic fermentation and continued maturation, which usually takes about 20 months. During this time the wine is frequently topped off, and occasionally racked (separating the sediment from the wine) until we feel it is ready to be bottled without filtration. Redolent of red currants, raspberries and plum cherries with hints of mint and sous bois, our Merlot possesses the rich tannin structure and natural acidity to age and evolve in the more classic manner preferred by our Bordeaux brethren.

Mitsuko's Vineyard Pinot Noir

An exciting new venture for Clos Pegase, Pinot Noir offers, perhaps, our greatest challenge yet. Starting with just a few producing acres in Mitsuko's Vineyard, we have been quietly vinifying a few hundred cases of Pinot Noir since 1996. We were so encouraged by these initial experiments that we've expanded our vineyard plantings to more than 20 acres of the finest clones of Pinot we could lay our hands on.

This fledgling program has even inspired the first significant redesign of our fermentation cellar, replete with new open-top fermentors and a pneumatic punchdown device designed to address the exacting requirements of this finicky variety.

Hand-picked and delivered early and fresh to the winery, these precious grapes are destemmed back into picking bins and gently tipped into the waiting fermentation vessels, in essence gravity-fed, without pumping or harming the delicate fruit. A long cold soak ensues before the native yeast begins churning sugar into alcohol.

Gently plunged these wines steadily put on weight as well as extract until, at the appropriate time, they are lightly pressed and sent to barrel for 10 months or so of mellowing. Allowed to rest on their lees these wines are neither blended nor decanted until bottling. The goal, as always at Clos Pegase, is to present these wines unfined and unfiltered with their full allocation of aromas and flavors left intact.

As some of the Pinot grows on the well-drained, gravelly flanks of Graveyard Hill, there is a femininity and floral profusion atypical of Carneros that wends its way into the wine. The other fruit, sourced from the more clayey slopes of Mitsuko's Vineyard provides the deeper bass and baritone notes more familiar to the connoisseur of Carneros Pinot Noir. A spray of cherry, licorice, strawberry and jam with svelte tannins and a lingering finish, this Pinot Noir will provide years of pleasure and improvement.