2015 QUPE ROUSSANNE BIEN NACIDO MAGNUM

93 Points - Vinous

The 2015 Roussanne Bien Nacido Hillside Estate is an attractive super-expressive wine gently shaped by aging in bottle. Hazelnut, dried flowers,chamomile and dried pear notes add lovely aromatic nuance to this open-knit, engaging white. The persistent, creamy finish is a thing of beauty. Roussanne often really blossoms with a bit of time in bottle. That is verymuch the case here.

This wine is 100% Roussanne from the Bien Nacido Vineyard in the Santa Maria Valley. This comes from a "custom block" that was planted exclusively for Qupe in 1997 using the Tablas Creek clone that came originally from Chateau de Beaucastel. It is a steep, west facing Hillside bench ... a cool climate site, but with lots of sun. 

The grapes were whole cluster pressed, the juice chilled overnight, and then pumped directly to barrel the next day. With Roussanne we go into the barrel "dirty", or with lots of the juice lees. We like the texture and complexity that lees add to the wine. For fermentation and aging we use exclusively one year old Francois Freres Burgundy barrels, barrels that were used once for Chardonnay. One year old barrels still have a nice but subtle level of oakiness, perfect we think for Roussanne. 

The wine went through complete malolactic in the barrel, aged on the lees, in the one year old barrels for the first 12 months. It was then racked and clarified through fining and returned to neutral barrels for another 6 months (so total time in barrel was 18 months). It was bottled without filtration