This well-structured medium-bodied dry red wine has plum, boysenberry, and vanilla spice aromas with bright, spicy red fruit flavors. Made to enjoy upon release, it is a good partner to red meats, roast chicken, duck, grilled vegetables and firm cheeses.

This Tempranillo is a youthful, dense wine, structured and fruit driven. This is the natural tendency of Tempranillo from Red Cedar Vineyard…keeping it tamed is the trick. This wine is 90% Tempranillo and 10% Tannat, and the most prominent artistry may have been the selection of multiple ages and types of oak barrels for a balanced, fruit driven style with enough structure, nuance and verve to add intrigue and lusciousness.

Our Red Cedar Estate Vineyard outside Paso Robles provides the grapes for this second vintage of Casa de Arcilla Tempranillo. At Red Cedar, the Tempranillo is planted on Arbuckle-San Ysidro fine sandy loam in a half-bowl shaped area, surrounded by hills and open to the north. All of the grapes came from block 74, which typically provides the darkest and richest Tempranillo from the estate. The block is planted 6x10 with vertical shoot positioning (VSP), on an FPS 03 clone. The vines are all spur pruned, which we follow with trimming by hand to end up with one shoot per spur and two clusters per shoot. We pull leaves on the morning sun side of the canopy. All the grapes are handpicked into half ton bins in the cool early morning, then field-sorted to remove defective fruit and leaves. We de-stem without crushing. The grapes were picked on October 10, 2010 after reaching optimum maturity. Yields were 13.3 pounds per vine, or approximately 4.8 tons per acre.

The grapes were hand-picked, delivered to the winery in half-ton bins, then destemmed. The must was transferred into stainless steel fermenters, and we inoculated with Prisse de Mousse yeast. Fermentation temperatures reached up to 84 degrees Fahrenheit. We pumped over the skins three times per day, and the new wine remained on skins for 11 days. We drained the tanks at dryness and pressed the skins with a Bucher bladder press. The hard press wine was discarded. All of the new wine aged 8 months in a variety of oak barrels, including one-year old Seguin Moreau from eastern Europe (adds structure and toast), and American barrels from Radoux & Demptos (for added aromatics). The balance aged in seasoned barrels to add fruit and balance. These barrel choices, particularly the European oak, provide more richness to the middle-mouth of Tempranillo, and eight months was just long enough to soften the tannins but keep the wine very fresh. The wine was bottled in August 3, 2011 and should improve for four to five years in the bottle.