Big Hands is Back!

We are excit­ed to announce that we are bring­ing back our val­ue label Big Hands this year with the release of the 2018 Big Hands San­ta Bar­bara Grenache. It has been five years since we have released a wine under our val­ue dri­ven label — Big Hands. The most obvi­ous ques­tion is why haven’t any of these wines been pro­duced? To under­stand the answer to that ques­tion, we must first explain how our wines are crafted.

What goes into Big Hands?

At Beck­men Vine­yards, we take pride in mak­ing our wines through small-lot pro­duc­tion. Each block of grapes is sep­a­rate­ly har­vest­ed, processed, and aged. 

Each of these indi­vid­ual blocks pos­sess their own unique fla­vors based on things like where the vines are plant­ed in the vine­yard, the age of the vines, the type of clon­al mate­r­i­al, how long the wines are aged, etc. When we pro­duce our wines, our wine­mak­ing team led by Steve Beck­men blends var­i­ous per­cent­ages of these dif­fer­ent lots togeth­er to cre­ate each wine. So, while it’s easy to under­stand that our flag­ship wine Cuvee Le Bec is a blend of four dif­fer­ent grapes, our sin­gle vari­etal wines like the Purisi­ma Moun­tain Vine­yard Syrah are also blends of dif­fer­ent blocks of the vine­yards. Some­times, we are left with some excess wine from var­i­ous blocks that does not fit into the recipe for one of our wines that vintage. 

Because of the drought, our har­vests were quite lean from 2014 to 2017 so there was not enough resid­ual juice to pro­duce Big Hands. That sit­u­a­tion changed in 2018. Accord­ing to wine­mak­er Steve Beck­men, ​“2018 was one of our finest vin­tages ever at Beck­men Vine­yards. We rarely expe­ri­ence vin­tages of this qual­i­ty and quan­ti­ty har­vest­ed. The per­fect weath­er con­di­tions lead­ing up to and dur­ing the 2018 har­vest were mag­i­cal and allowed us to craft wines of the high­est qual­i­ty.” While we could eas­i­ly sell this excess wine to oth­er wine mak­ers, the remain­ing wines are just too good to sell in bulk – so we are rein­tro­duc­ing Big Hands.

While Big Hands have many of the same attrib­ut­es that all Beck­men wines pos­sess, these wines are fla­vor­ful, small pro­duc­tion wines designed to drink now. Through­out this year, we will be releas­ing sev­er­al dif­fer­ent Big Hands wines start­ing with the 2018 Big Hands San­ta Bar­bara Grenache. 

2018 Big Hands Santa Barbara Grenache

After blend­ing the 2018 vin­tage, we had 8 bar­rels of Grenache from the 2018 vin­tage that did not fit into the 2018 Cuvee Le Bec blend. We aged the Grenache for a total of 26 months in neu­tral oak and cre­at­ed the 2018 Big Hands Grenache. Keep­ing the wine for an addi­tion­al year in bar­rel round­ed out the Grenache fla­vors and aro­mas. The wine is gen­er­ous and round with big, ripe fruit that remains fresh and vibrant. It exhibits straw­ber­ry, black cher­ry, rasp­ber­ry, and grena­dine aro­mas and fla­vors. With sub­tle hints of pep­per and spice, the 2018 Big Hands Grenache is a real crowd pleaser.

Because we uti­lize the bulk of our grapes in our nor­mal pro­duc­tion, pro­duc­tion on Big Hands wines is typ­i­cal­ly lim­it­ed. For exam­ple, the 8 remain­ing bar­rels of Grenache pro­duced about 200 cas­es of wine. Pro­duced from estate grown fruit, Big Hands wines overde­liv­er at their prices.

Through­out the rest of this year, keep your eyes peeled for new Big Hands releas­es. Giv­en their val­ue one thing is cer­tain: you’ll need some fast hands to get ahold of Big Hands.