How Do We Create New Wines and Blends? New La Finca Release

I wish I could say it was some sort of ​“divine inter­ven­tion” or some­thing mag­i­cal like that. It would also be great to claim that I cre­at­ed some­thing new and dif­fer­ent that has nev­er been done before. The truth is when we cre­ate a new wine, style, or blend, it typ­i­cal­ly comes from some­thing I have tast­ed. I spend sev­er­al years research­ing (tast­ing!) dif­fer­ent exam­ples, before set­tling on a style that I pre­fer, and last­ly see­ing if it is pos­si­ble to repli­cate it from our own vineyards.

The process begins in the cel­lar by blend­ing dif­fer­ent bar­rels of our own Beck­men wine togeth­er to see if some­thing sparks my inter­est and taste buds. If I find some­thing good, we will then try to make a small-scale blend and then a larg­er blend. If all that goes well, we will start to bot­tle it under our EXP pro­gram. If the reac­tion from our EXP mem­ber­ship is pos­i­tive, then the wine moves into our port­fo­lio. The fin­ish­ing touch is to make it our own, reflect­ing our vine­yards, cli­mate, and wine style. This is how we cre­at­ed La Fin­ca, our newest release.

La Fin­ca is inspired by the wines from a small region near Barcelona, Spain called Pri­o­rat, where Granacha (as Grenache is called in Spain) is blend­ed with small amounts of Caber­net Sauvi­gnon, Syrah, and some­times Carig­nan. Hav­ing been exposed to some of the finest wines from that region like Clos Mogador, Clos Eras­mus, and Mas Mar­tinet a cou­ple of decades ago, I became fas­ci­nat­ed by these robust, age-wor­thy wines that are mas­sive, pow­er­ful, and struc­tured. Each wine pos­sessed its own style from tra­di­tion­al to mod­ern, and con­sist­ed of a dif­fer­ent blend. Need­less to say, there was a lot to learn.

Sim­ply trans­lat­ed as ​“The Farm”, La Fin­ca (named by long time cel­lar mas­ter Abel Her­rera) was first intro­duced to our EXP mem­ber­ship in 2015 with the release of the 2013 vin­tage. We have pro­duced three vin­tages of La Fin­ca for our EXP mem­bers: 2013, 2017 and 2019. We used these ini­tial vin­tages as an explo­ration of style, and they pro­vid­ed us with a pletho­ra of infor­ma­tion about how we want­ed to craft the 2021 vin­tage, the first offi­cial release of La Fin­ca. That exper­i­men­ta­tion is the beau­ty of the EXP pro­gram for us and for you: long-time mem­bers can fol­low the devel­op­ment of a wine’s style as we explore the pos­si­bil­i­ties and find our direc­tion for new wines such as La Finca.

2021 La Finca

54% Grenache from Purisi­ma Moun­tain Vineyard
38% Caber­net Sauvi­gnon from the Thomas and Judith Beck­men Estate Vineyard
8% Syrah from Purisi­ma Moun­tain Vineyard

Stun­ning, ripe, rich aro­mas of cher­ry, straw­ber­ry, rasp­ber­ry pre­serves, red cur­rants, and cher­ry blos­soms seam­less­ly come togeth­er show­ing off both the Grenache and Caber­net Sauvi­gnon fruits. The entry on the palate is silky and ele­gant, where lift­ed fla­vors of cher­ry pre­serves, straw­ber­ry, roast­ed herbs, cher­ry skin, and blue­ber­ry shine. The wine turns dark­er on the back end due to the Syrah, where the brighter up-front red fruits tran­si­tion to blue and black fruits, fin­ish­ing long with a big tan­nin struc­ture and fine acid­i­ty. It will evolve effort­less­ly for the next 20+ years.

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