Au Bon Climat – Pinot Noir Lala Panzi Vineyard 2018

 The extraordinary fruit is sorted vigorously in the vineyard, and trucked to the winery in the cool of the night arriving early morning. They are the first grapes to arrives nearly every harvest. Once again, no adulterations were done to the grapes. A long and slow fermentation, extracts pretty but complex Pinot flavors. As with all our Pinot Noirs, we are “hands-on”. Every Pinot Noir is fermented in 5 ton open-top fermenters, which are punched down once or twice a day. These punch downs breakup the cap of skins that rises to the surface and pushed back into the juice so the fermentation process extracts the best part of the Pinot grapes. The wine is pressed to complete dryness and goes to barrel with moderate lees. This wine was aged for 20 months in François Frères French oak barrels, 50% new.