Wine Club | August 22: Central Coast Summer Soif
Central Coast Summer Soif
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Central Coast Summer Soif 〰️
Cou cou Little Prince Wine Club Members!
As the mild, “Why is it cloudy?”-summer of June and July shifts into the heart of the season’s lingering heat, Little Prince is ready to set up you with the juice for any pool-sides, road-trips, or lack of air conditioning! For our inaugural wine club release we’ll be taking you to an old stomping ground of ours, California’s Central Coast. A region so poignantly full of sunshine and nostalgia, we could hardly resist hopping in the car to go visit some of these amazing producers. (Which we highly recommend doing yourself!). But first, we’d like to thank our wine club members for waiting patiently for this first newsletter/blog release. All wine club members will receive an email upon the newsletter’s release and it will also promptly be accessible on our website as a blog post for all to see and revisit. The newsletter and each month’s wine club wines will be available on the first Saturday of the month going forward. We’d like you to view this newsletter as your chance to delve, get nerdy, and really learn about the wines in our club. We’ll be going over culture and history, stories of producers and their faithful vineyard dogs, and touching up on incoming programming down at Little Prince & Bottleshop. Without further ado, let’s get to the glou!
As an AVA (American Viticultural Area), the Central Coast is a vast swath of land stretching all the way from the environs of Santa Barbara County to the south of San Francisco. To keep it simple, we are going to stay in and around the Santa Barbara area, the main viticultural areas of which are the Santa Ynez and the Santa Maria valleys. Chardonnay dominates in terms of plantings with over 7,000 acres covering the region, 2000 acres more than the second most prolific cultivar in the region, Pinot Noir. While the area might be fiercely associated with summer, the unique position of the two transverse (east to west) mountain ranges cutting across the valley create a patchwork of cool microclimates and varying soil types that make Santa Barbara county perfect Chardonnay territory. This unique landscape, which is the largest of its kind between Alaska and South America, enables cooling winds to sweep east in from the west at the opening of the valley due to a natural phenomena called the Coriolis Effect. Thus, the region is in fact one of the coolest in all of California. An ideal place for cool-climate Burgundian varietals like Chardonnay, Pinot and Gamay which brings us to our first two wines from producers, Ashkahn Wines and Lo-Fi.
For the two wines included in both subscriptions of our wine club, we wanted to choose wines indicative of past and present in the Central Coast natural wine scene. Without exaggeration, Ashkahn is one of the most intriguing and delicious new natural wine projects I’ve got my hands on in the last few years. Ashkahn Shahparina is an artist, stationary prince, all around interdisciplinary bon vivant in addition to being a nascent winemaker. I dig this. We read. We write. We sing and we drink, why limit ourselves to one domain? And especially when the wines are as dialed in and precise as Ash’s “Lou”, a blend of chardonnay from two different vineyards, Shokrian and Donnachadt