Lioco Sativa Carignan Mendocino 2019

 Why fix a wine that "ain't broke?" A: Because to rest on one’s laurels in today’s wine market is to tempt fate. We made several trips to Jim McCutchen’s Carignan vineyard over the off-season with the sole objective of differentiating the three unique blocks. Our findings inspired this wine from the oldest of the three blocks and which are dry farmed on the ranch’s stoniest soils (there is in fact a stone quarry below the vineyard). We challenged our winemaking assumptions too and elected to keep the wine in barrel for an additional 6-months with the goal of further refining the wine’s prodigious tannins. The resulting 2019 Sativa is a shocker—dark and brooding, but with a Burgundy-like velvet that we don’t associate with this workman’s grape.