2023 Ruth Lewandowski "Feints"

Well, this is the cuvee that started it all. This wine is very special but it’s often described as just a carbonic co-fermentation of Arneis, Dolcetto, Nebbiolo, Barbera and a few others depending on vintage. Now, this is mostly true but to simply say this wine is ‘carbonic’ and leave it there is missing the hippest part of the Feints equation. See, this wine is made in a very clever manner that plenty of other Cali producers like Les Lunes have since adopted. Evan, like many American producers, like to work with Flextanks. To the uninitiated, these are polyethylene tanks that come in a variety of shapes and are affordable, easy to clean, breathable and neutral. They’re awesome and they’re one of the few American wine equipment companies worth buying from. The problem is that they absolutely cannot hold pressure and carbonic methods are necessarily oriented around pressure. So how does Evan do a ‘carbo’ style thing in a Flextank egg? Well, the method is pretty wild and ingenious. The different varieties are layered into the tank with intermittent blankets of dry ice, the frozen solid form of CO2. That allows a winemaker to get the carbonic effect only achieved by whole-berry, enzymatic conversion to happen without all the vinegary perils. Even still, Evan needs to be judicious in his applications of sulfite on this wine as Feints is a large volume cuvee for him and volatile acidity is still very much a risk with this system. It’s intense, it’s clever and it produces an absolutely stellar light red that takes a chill real well while still showing surprising structure and potency.