Our Winemaking Philosophy
Our wine philosophy is our vineyard philosophy. Be gentle, encourage independence, treat the vines with wine in mind while respecting their individual nature, and intervene as little as possible but before it is necessary. Less technology is often better, and vigilance is the most important thing. Natural acidity and tannin is your friend, too much or too little sun is bad, and raisins aren’t for wine. We farm first, and highlighting our volcanic vineyard at 1,500' of elevation is the core of our philosophy.
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Prima Materia’s lighter red wines
Our Dolcetto and Grenache are radically different from each other. Our Dolcetto can have both pretty and meaty qualities, all cherry and pepper, is cofermented with white grapes, and can stand up to charcuterie, light but hearty. The Grenache however, is pure strawberry and cherry bliss, sunshine in a bottle. Sangiovese is a true passion though, bettering Pinot, delicious young, incredibly layered and textured in middle age, and savory in the extreme with notes of pine and earthy saline minerality after a few years in the bottle. We employ a little stem and whole-cluster winemaking here as well.
Prima Materia's mid-weight red wines
Our Zinfandel is an attempt to capture what Zin field blends might have been like in 1900, plenty of fruit but savory and a little spicy. Negro Amaro is the opposite, unknown in California twenty years ago, here bottled young for striking aromatics of fig, olive, and black cherry making it the ultimate BBQ wine. Barbera, another grilled-food winner, is treated very differently to keep the focus on its acidity, pomegranate and purple fruit, along with longer aging. Some of our wines are made from multiple vineyard blocks, different clones, training, and rootstocks for complexity. The Barbera is actually three different types for example, all made separately from our three different vineyard blocks with different goals in mind for each planting, all bringing something to the party.
Prima Materia’s bold red wines
The big reds are where our altitude and volcanic soils really shine. We grow some of the only Sagrantino and Refosco in California, and while both are pretty serious, the Sagrantino is a beautiful tannic beast with big fruit plus roasted herbs, huge tannin and lilting floral tones. Our Nebbiolo pays homage to the wines of Barbaresco, full of beauty disciplined by tannin, and I push that fermentation as far and long as it can possibly go in the old Piemontese tradition, and even train our vines in the same way - cane pruned, eight buds. Our biggest and baddest red is Aglianico, the ancient Italian grape that can shame gravelly Bordeaux and mountain-side Cabernet, needing at least three years in barrels and ageable for decades in the bottle with Old-World minerality and that sense of history we so love. I move those grapes exclusively by hand and employ very long fermentations. With grapes like these it is best to embrace the beast within.
