Varieties: 75% Pinot Noir, 25% Chardonnay
Location: California
Alcohol: 12%

This wine is a step toward what you might expect from a more traditional producer, but it retains unmistakable brightness and energy that you’d expect from Carboniste wines. This is a very expressive rosé sparkling wine, benefiting from high altitude, above the fog inversion in Santa Cruz. It has added weight from aging in barrel as well as in bottle, which allows this wine to handle fatty foods better than our earlier offerings. Consider pairing this wine with moules frites or steak tartare.

Grapes were pressed whole cluster and settled for 1-2 days as juice. Clear juice helps to retain the purity and focus of this wine. The juice was fermented in barrel with native and commercial yeast at 60-70°F for 3 weeks. The fermentation sediment was kept with the wine in barrel for 11 months without the addition of sulfur dioxide. The wine was bottled with fresh yeast and a small amount of sugar. After 18 months in bottle, the yeast had consumed the sugar, the sediment was removed, a small amount of wine and sugar was added back. The bottles were recapped in order to preserve the natural youth and freshness of the wine.

This wine is assembled from two cool-climate, Santa Cruz Mountain vineyards from which Carboniste sources Pinot noir and Chardonnay. The Pinot Noir is from the highest vineyard in SCM. The Chardonnay is from the Bald Mountain Vineyard. Both sites are composed of decomposed granite and marine sediment, which is very expressive soil.