Carlton Hill Vineyard Aug 17'09

We started buying fruit from David Polite in 2006. The bulk of the fruit from this vineyard goes into David's own Carlton Hill Wine Company. We usually get enough fruit for one fermenter, and it's quickly becoming one of our favorites each year. One reason Athena and I both love it is because we can usually do partial whole-cluster fermentation with the fruit from Carlton Hill. It's an early ripening site, so the stems are usually lignified enough (brown and crunchy, not green and stemmy) to allow us to bypass the destemmer.