Featured Vintage
2002 Dry Creek Valley
Cabernet Sauvignon

Speaking of Cabernet, we’d like to recommend our latest vintage for your springtime table. Passalacqua’s 2002 Dry Creek Valley Cab blends grapes from the TR Passalacqua Vineyard with a touch (3%) of Merlot for a dense, chewy red wine with fully integrated and mouth-coating tannins wrapped around a core of luscious berry fruit. Full of the concentrated flavors of blackberry and cassis wedded to oak toast, it has a long finish with subtle fruit aromatics that persist as the oak fades to mocha and coffee. This Cabernet is definitely enjoyable now but also worthy of cellaring, if you have the patience! $40

This delicious Cabernet can be ordered online, or by calling
877-825-5547, or drop by our tasting room any day between 11am–5pm.

Upcoming Events
Join us at the Winery for these upcoming events.

Wine Club Garden Party
Saturday, May 21
Passa il Vino members and their friends are invited to join us for free wine tasting and hors d’oeuvres on the deck. To join the wine club, email passailvino@passalacquawinery.com

From Sourdough to Sustainability: The History of Food in California
Saturday, June 4
San Francisco Chronicle restaurant columnist GraceAnn Walden, who also leads history gourmet tours of San Francisco neighborhoods, will present a fun and informative talk and generous tastes of her well-researched history of California food and dining. The extensive talk covers two hundred years of food mores in the Golden State, from the Ohlone Indians to modern farmers and chefs dedicated to sustainable food. Food samplings include representative dishes from California culinary history — Ohlone acorns to Gold Rush oysters to contemporary California cuisine paired with Passalacqua wines. Chef Shanti Wilson will assist Walden, and the class will be held on Passalacqua’s shaded deck overlooking the vineyards of Dry Creek Valley. Call (877) 759-1004 for reservations and more information.

Heritage Celebration
Saturday, July 23
Members of historic wine families from the Russian River area will share stories of the early days of California’s wine industry during this benefit for the Healdsburg Museum. Call the winery at 877-825-5547
for ticket information.

Wine Club Barbecue
Saturday, August 6
Celebrate summer with wine, fresh-from-the-grill cuisine, and live music here at the winery. Reserve your spot now, these events sell out quickly!

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Passalacqua’s 2001 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet
Judged Golden At San Francisco Chronicle
Wine Competition

We’re pleased to announce that our first-ever entry in the San Francisco Chronicle Wine Competition has come out a winner! At the fifth-annual event judged January 25 through 28, Passalacqua’s 2001 Dry Creek Valley Cabernet Sauvignon was awarded the Schott Zwiesel Double Gold Best Of Class among Cabernets priced $30 and over.

This year’s Chronicle Wine Competition included entries from over 900 winery brands from California, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Passalacqua’s winning Cabernet was among over 3,200 wines evaluated by 55 professional judges from across the United States.

New Addition To The Passalacqua Family

Jason and Noelle are also happy to tell you that their daughter Mariella Jean was born on February 13. Mariella is already involved in the family business, having handily greeted many guests during Barrel Tasting Weekend earlier this spring. She’s now busy sleeping and practicing her smile in preparation for upcoming winery events.

Winemaker's Notes: Spring in the Cellar
with Margaret Devenport

March has finally arrived with its tantalizingly warm weather, and everyone is happy to see — fingers crossed — big winter storms gone for another year. The reservoirs are full and the days are getting longer. Budbreak in the vineyard began in March in early varietals like Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, and as soon as the young leaves emerge, the harvest clock begins to tick for winemakers everywhere.

Spring is traditionally the time to order oak barrels for the coming harvest. Early orders are essential to obtain the best quality product, whether American, French, or Hungarian. The coopers must consider buying wood years in advance of actually making the barrels, and the stave wood split (for French and Hungarian varieties) or sawn (for American barrels) from the selected logs is sometimes allowed to age outdoors for over three years. This long weathering produces the finest, most subtly flavored oak, and is in great demand among boutique winemakers. Barrel allotments from the most renowned coopers are not uncommon, and to increase one’s share means another winemaker has either retired or been shot by a winery owner.

Spring cellar work also involves barrels. The season’s weather always brings the laggard malolactic fermentations to a close, after which Bordeaux varietals like Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot can be racked off their gross fermentation lees, the barrels washed, the lees discarded, and the young wine returned to oak with a light dose of sulfur. The small additions of sulfur during the two years of barrel aging reduce the tendency of wine to turn to vinegar from the activity of acetic acid bacteria. Likewise, Chardonnay and Pinot Noir get sulfur additions after the malolactic fermentation concludes, but they remain on their gross lees and are stirred monthly until just before bottling and after just one year in oak.

Sometimes spring cellar work involves readying wines for bottling, like Sauvignon Blanc from the previous vintage. For complexity, we’ve mixed various clonal selections of the varietal, and for crisp expression of the fruit, we’ve tank fermented and done no oak aging. Little time was spent on the lees, and then the wine was chilled prior to filtration and bottling in April. Keeping it below 40° F for several weeks will decrease the wine’s tendency to “throw” or precipitate delicate, glass-like crystals of tartaric acid after bottling (warming the wine causes the crystals to dissolve).

This is also the season to bottle red wines like Zinfandel which are commonly aged for 18 months in oak. It’s the winemaker’s time to assess vineyard lots, barrel suitability to vineyard sites, and make small tabletop blends (mulling such questions as, “Is there enough oak or too much to express true varietal character?” and, “Is the texture and weight correct?”). Then comes the winemaking magic…but it’s all a secret after that!

Farmer's Corner: Spring 2005
Tom & Sandi Passalacqua

The vineyards are absolutely beautiful at this time of year, when the terrior is covered by a blanket of golden mustard flowers hovering among freshly pruned vines ready for bud break. It’s also a busy season for the farmer, as we do the critical pruning, grooming, and grafting that will impact our crop yield.

Most area farmers began pruning in early February in order to avoid the onset of Eutypa, a disease that can accompany winter rains (November through January) and greatly impact grape maturation and yield. Eutypa makes its way into vines via pruning wounds, and its presence isn’t visible until the next year, when it shows up in the wood of the vine.

Once the threat of Eutypa decreases, the multi-step process of pruning and preparing the vineyard gets under way. When the laborers prune, they first mark every dead vine by tying a colored plastic tape on the post next to it. After the dead vines are marked, they’re removed and burned. We then dig a two-by-three-foot hole where the removed vine was planted. At Passalacqua’s Cabernet vineyard, we mix pumice and cow or horse manure with a rocky soil and plant a grafted vine or rootstock in the hole with the soil mixture. Rootstock is a wild vine that does not produce grapes, so it’s necessary to bud the vine. The budding process involves taking bud wood from a producing vine, which is placed under the skin of the trunk of the rootstock. When the bud grows, it develops into a cane that is trained into a vine. The remainder of the wild vine trunk above the bud is then cut off, causing all of the vine’s nutrients to be used for the new growth.

A farmer is always focused on producing a well-balanced grape juice for the vintner – meaning that the acids, tannins/brix, etc. are not spiked too high or low – and this is the season for beginning the soil tests that help us guide the grape toward that balance. Soil tests allow us to determine what additives, if any, the vine needs. Tests are conducted by digging a one-foot-deep hole near various vines in different sections of the vineyard, collecting the displaced dirt in plastic sample bags, and sending the samples to a laboratory for analysis. If the soil analysis shows a deficiency of nutrients, we’ll apply the appropriate additives to the soil so that winter rains can carry the nutrients to the vine’s roots.

While some of the vineyard laborers assist with soil tests and soil balancing, others check the irrigation pumps and clean the sprinklers that will protect the new growth from frosts. Frost damage is always a threat after budbreak, which began recently (white grapes by mid-March and red grapes by April 1, depending on the weather).

Though the maintenance of a premium vineyard never ends, the pride in the quality of the wine is such a driving force that the farmer welcomes all of these springtime tasks that prepare the vineyard for the 2005 harvest.