A First Look at Vintage 2021

This week we systematically tasted samples from barrels of the 2021 vintage. Naturally we have been tasting the wines since the juice started fermenting in September. But that was random and more focused on evaluating fermentation’s progress, looking for potential issues. This tasting was our first opportunity to get a feel for of the overall style and the quality of the vintage. Most of the wines have now settled down enough to start to reveal their personalities. A few barrels remain cloudy and fizzy as they are still working on fermenting the last few grams of sugar.

Exceeded expectations. The whites are boxing above their weight class. While their alcohols and volume are modest, there is a core of concentration and verve that defines a great vintage. The question kept coming up as to how that could be, given that the weather during harvest was less than ideal. We kept referring to the 2013 vintage in Burgundy, which was a wet, rainy year that produced some beautiful white wines with great minerality and typicity.

Right now we have more questions than answers, but we were wowed.

The red wines have a restrained femininity that reminds us more of Burgundy than Bordeaux. These are not powerful wines, but their elegance and precision is intriguing. It is a stylistic direction to which we have been slowly gravitating. The weather in 2021 gave us material that demanded a careful, light hand in the cellar. This may be the beginning of significant shift in Linden’s red wines. With climate change we simply don’t know if 2021 is an anomaly or what we should expect for the future.

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Linden Vineyards / Learn More / Latest at Linden | Journal: November 21, 2021