Every once in a while, you encounter a situation that turns out to be a pleasant surprise, especially when it involves a long period of time – years in fact, and I wanted to tell a story about two of our wines, one of which is in this Carneros Club shipment. It is as much about the wine as it is the label and the story behind the label. This is the 2024 Pinot Noir Nouveau, which is the second vintage that we have made of this wine.

The first vintage of the Pinot Noir Nouveau was 2023, and during the harvest we picked a small amount of Pinot Noir, put it into a fermenter and did what we call a “cold soak”, which is hold the grapes in the tank for a few days and around 45F to 50F. After that we warmed it a little bit, added some yeast to let it ferment for a day or two, then pressed the skins away from the still-fermenting juice, finally letting the fermentation finish in the tank. This short amount of skin contact time during the few days of fermentation gave us a wine that made us think of a “nouveau” style wine, similar to a Beaujolais Nouveau in character: light body, low tannins, and yet very fruity. Not a Rose, and not a fuller body Pinot Noir, but something in between.

Well, making the wine was the easy part! It took us a few months to get it bottled, and in that time we threw around ideas of names and labels. Do we use our regular watercolor label, or do we try something new? Having worked for the Roche family for a long time (it will be 30 years very soon!), I remembered a dry rose that we made in 1995, and we only made about 200 cases as dry rose was not in fashion back then. For a label, a local artist had painted the front of the original winery up on the hill, and Joe Roche paid her to use this painting and made up a nice watercolor label. Well, as the wine didn’t move very quickly, this label specific to the wine was basically forgotten. One of my ideas that I came up with for the 2023 Pinot Noir Nouveau was to see if we could resurrect this label, so I found an old bottle from 1995 and within the artwork I found a name – Muriel Schmalberg Ullman – and I searched online for her. I found a few small art studios and some other exhibit information but no other information on her, so I didn’t have much hope, but I decided to call one of the studios, and to my surprise they gave me her phone number. I called her and I couldn’t believe it was her, the same person from 30 years ago! I told her what I was interested in doing and she was ecstatic! After a few discussions we decided to pay her a little for the use of the artwork, and to our surprise she gifted us the original artwork.

We then scanned it and once we had the coloring as close to the original, we (Andrew our previous Asst Winemaker, and I) played around with parts of the original and made an updated border, came up with the text and layout. Andrew was the tech whiz and made it all useable for the printer, so he gets that credit! After several weeks of playing with it we came up with a beautiful label and I think we made Muriel proud – and of course we were so happy to show off her beautiful artwork!

So, with this shipment, raise a toast to Muriel and also toast the past that comes around albeit 30 years later! If you like watercolor artwork and want to see more of her art, where she will be showing her pieces, and even find out about her new book, the best thing is to do an internet search for her name, and you can find out lots about her. (She told me that this is the best method!)