Vineyard notes
Several years ago, we were introduced to Lowell Stone who owns Fox Hill Vineyard. Fox Hill is on the Eastern slope of the Ukiah Basin between Ukiah and Hopland. The unique feature of this operation is Lowell's commitment to growing only Italian and Portugese varietals including several clones of Sangiovese which we were interested in buying. A while later, Lowell encouraged me to make some wine from a grape indigenous to the region North of Venice, the subalpine district of Friuli. The grape, Tocai, from Friuli is called Tocai Friulano. We were quite impressed with our first attempts although we had to adjust the acidity (upwards) and the pH (downwards) during the winemaking process. Afterwards, Lowell wanted us to try a new planting of Cortese, a grape from Piedmonte. That proved to be successful also. So, for awhile, we were producing both Tocai Friulano and Cortese. Then, a manager of a market that sells our wine remarked that we were making too many different varietals for him to stock. As a result, we decided to combine these two varietals as a blend which we called "Piccola," meaning "little" in Italian. So that is the origin of our latest creation from Fox Hill Vineyard.
Production notes
Our experience with this blend is that when both the Tocai and Cortese are picked at maturity, around 23 to 24 Brix, the resulting juice has tended be too low in acidity. Thus our first approach was to boost the natural acidity (with tartaric acid) during fermentation. For a light wine, we also thought the alcohol was too high, often reaching 14%. Over the years, we have requested to have the grapes harvested at a lower Brix. For this current 2008 vintage we were successful, achieving higher natural acidity and lower alcohol (12.7%). We think this makes for a much better balanced light wine with abundant floral aromas. In the trade, this wine is vinted in the "throttle to bottle" mode. Note the bottling date, before Halloween, was just two months from harvest!
This wine was produced entirely in stainless steel tanks via a cold fermentation to lock in the floral character of these two varietals.
Awards
2008 Piccola
2007 Piccola
2005 Piccola
2004 Cortese
2004 Tocai Friulano