Winemaking is often portrayed as a precise process where everything happens according to some grand design. And to be fair, I believe strongly in doing things with intention. Much of what we do at St.Amant from the varieties we grow, to how we ferment a wine, to how long we leave it in barrels is very deliberate. But sometimes Mother Nature, or life, has other plans.
Learning when to stick with the plan and when to pivot has always been part of St.Amant. And some of our most memorable wines have come from those moments.
Twenty-six years ago, my dad thought he was growing Roussanne. We planted the vines in 1995, made the wine and even won a top award at the California State Fair before discovering that the vines weren’t Roussanne at all. They were Viognier. What could have simply been a mistake became Le Mystère, one of the more memorable wines and stories in St.Amant’s history.
A few years later, in 2004, Barbera threw us another curveball. The grapes came into the winery far riper than we had intended. We weren’t quite sure what to do with them, so we did what many people do when faced with problem. Forget about it, put it in barrels, and hope it goes away. A year later, we tasted it again and discovered something delicious. That accident became our first Late Harvest Barbera, a decadent wine that ultimately was served as communion wine at two churches, and beloved by many customers.
Which brings us to La Barbera Fresca. Two tons of 2025 Barbera from Shinn Farms was supposed to be a rosé. That was the plan. We crushed the fruit and left it soaking on the skins overnight. Barbera has plenty of color, and by the time we pressed it, the wine was already much darker than I had intended. We fermented it like a rosé, but as the wine developed, it became clear that we had ended up somewhere between rosé and red.
Then there was another practical consideration: we didn’t really need more rosé. So last winter, without quite knowing what we were going to do with it, we moved the wine into barrels and left it alone. Sound familiar?
A couple months later we started tasting it. The wine had become really interesting – bright, fruity and incredibly refreshing. Lots of fresh strawberry, cherry and almost a cranberry-juice-like character, with the naturally zippy acidity that makes Barbera such a fun grape.
And by then another idea had started to make sense. Over the past few years, lighter, chillable reds have become a thing. Easy drinking reds that are less about extraction, oak and seriousness, and more about fruit, freshness and simply being delicious.
