2023 QUPE GRENACHE SANTA BARBARA

The 2023 vintage was a classic vintage for the Santa Barbara County Grenache. Warm days and cold nights helped to naturally limit yields while allowing our various Grenache sites to develop the full array of cool-climate Grenache notes: bright strawberry, blood orange, baking spices, and purple flowers. Though rich and concentrated, the palate is smooth and the finish is as long and fresh as the summer evenings that inspire this wine.

VINEYARD
Qupé has been crafting cool-climate Grenache from Santa Barbara County for over 40 years. We know where the best fruit comes from and we leverage our long-term relationships to have our vineyard partners farm specific sites to our very strict requirements – low yield, clean, unblemished fruit, all certified sustainable. We want this wine to speak of its cool-climate origins, while showcasing the diversity of the Santa Barbara County. 90% of the wine comes from 20+ year old vines growing in the warmer soils of the Los Olivos district (not far from the winery) that yield a medium-dark color, with spicy red fruit notes and aromatic lift. The remaining 10% is grown in the sandy, gravelly hillside soils of Ballard Canyon, where we find slightly cooler days and even colder nights that reveal blood orange and baking spice notes. The final blend yields a quintessential Santa Barbara County Grenache.

WINEMAKING
As with all our red wines, this wine was crafted with traditional methods in our modern, state of the art winery: hand harvesting at night to benefit from our cold evenings, small picks at a broad spectrum of ripeness to ensure maximum complexity, and flavor development. We employ a mix of quite small open-top tanks and medium sized closed tanks for a short cold-soak before a rather quick fermentation that allows us to maximize color and medium weight, balanced tannins and a long smooth finish. After fermentation, the must is gently pressed to stainless tanks to settle overnight before being racked to French Oak barrels for 18 months of aging on very fine lees. As bottling approaches, the wine is clean racked under nitrogen to tank for final blending and resting before bottling using our own bottling equipment.