Clos De La Tech

Clos De La Tech
1697 Industrial Road
San Carlos, California
USA 94070
Phone: (408) 943-2900
http://www.closdelatech.com/

Contact: T.J. Rodgers
Email: [email protected]

Listening to the master. After trying for three years to visit Romanée-Conti, I finally received a private tour from Aubert de Villaine, the owner of the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti (DRC), which makes the most expensive red burgundy in the world, Romanée-Conti.

Although our American Pinot Noir is different from French Burgundies, as we optimize them for the soils and climate in California, we have taken the winemaking process used at DRC as the baseline for how we make wine. Others de-stem the grape berries prior to fermentation, but the DRC ferments whole clusters. Our experimentation at Clos de la Tech showed that whole clusters (which reduce the amount of seed tannin in the wine and increase the amount of stem tannin in the wine) make bigger wines with rounder, softer tannin. The DRC uses native (field) yeast to ferment. We also do not add refined yeast to the fermentation and prefer the complexity of the natural fermentation in which several varieties of native field yeasts ferment the wine.

We use the same barrel maker as does DRC, François Fréres, from the town of Saint Romain in Burgundy. We also prefer our oak from the Bertrange forest in central France, because of its very understated oak flavor, which allows us to use all new barrels for every harvest without over-oaking the wine. Like DRC, we also bottle our wine by gravity with no filtration. Although we do use high technology to monitor the grapes during the growing season and the wine during fermentation and barrel-aging, we never deviate from the basic Burgundian “recipe” that was firmly established in the 1830s, unless that new technology dramatically improves the wine (for example, our fully automated, but very gentle wine press—patent pending).

Winemaker: T.J. Rodgers

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