2011 The Prince in his Caves Farina Vineyard
Prince Triumphant! You know by now how challenging the 2011 harvest was. As the 2011 Prince harvest drew near, we reflected how in 2010, the fruit for the Prince barely ripened in the cool, challenging, Farina vineyard. So when conditions were even cooler in 2011, I made the difficult decision of shifting half of the fruit from the earlier ripening LSB-devoted section of the vineyard to the Prince. We harvested this fruit at the end of September, and fermented all of it in puncheons without de-stemming: whole-cluster white wine. Stems and all. We brought the rest of the fruit in early October.
On the whole, the 2011 Prince is 50% whole cluster, 50% stems included. The wine is remarkable—in part from the intensity of the LSB section; in part from the whole clusters. There is no green-ness, no stemy-ness: only a deep, smoky wine with tannins that are rich and structured, civil and well-organized. The wine is less mahogany and cloudy than the 2007, but darker, richer, sharper than the 2010. A triumph in a difficult year.