Hiyu 'Columba' Spring Ephemeral, Columbia Gorge Red Wine, 2022, 750ml

Description

This parcel is above Falcon box on the gently rolling plateau on the top of the farm. It’s planted to a field blend of grapes from Northern Spain and Portugal but based on Tempranillo, Prieto Picudo, Juan Garcia, Trousseau and Babosa Negro.
This is made and aged identically to Aura and like that wine reveals something about the history of wine that was invisible to us. I’m obsessed with the older wines of Lopez de Heredia but can’t for the life of me understand how they came to be.
When Tempranillo and associated grapes are fermented as a traditional red wine (even after being aged in barrel for many years) they produce a wine that is impenetrably dark and tannic. Older bottles of their Vina Bosconia behave somewhere in between Barolo and Burgundy. They are very pale in color. How do they come to be like this? My instinct is that it isn’t all just the extended aging.
We started making Columba in 2016 and from that first vintage until 2021 it was fermented as a red wine and finished its fermentation on the skins. All of those wines except the 2017 are still in barrel and while impressive... they behave closer to
Cabernet or Syrah than to the Barolo or Brunello. So in 2022 we changed track. We set out to make a Rosé, pressing was delayed a few days and we ended up pressing the wine beyond where we would normally press for a pink wine, but far earlier than what we would usually do for red wine.
Normally, I would refer to this place in the fermentation (almost exactly half way through its sugar conversion) as “no man’s land” and kind of a dangerous place to press (At risk for massive reduction, stuck fermentations etc.). But we did it anyway... and the results have been very curious and compelling.
After 30 months in barrel it is nothing like anything we’ve made before. It is a beautiful red/amber/orange hue. There are aromas of dark berries, forest floor and haunting, oxidative brown spice notes. In some ways it smells like an older wine and then on the palette all of the freshness return where it’s bright, with very fresh lifted fruit and floral notes. The nose tells you one thing and the experience of tasting it is totally other... but it is far closer to Pinot or Nebbiolo... far closer to what I imagine those young Lopez wines might have been like than what we had been doing previously.
Along with the 22 Aura this is entirely new ground for us and we’re very excited to see where this trajectory leads us.