Newsletter #5 - Fall 2024

Dear Trois Noix Community,

We hope you are enjoying the crisp Fall air as we transition into the holiday season. Here in the Napa Valley harvest is over, the leaves on the vines are turning from green to golden brown, and the wines from the 2024 vintage are now resting safely in barrel. We made it!

The 2024 Harvest

I am incredibly excited for the 2024 vintage for several reasons: impeccable fruit quality, relatively small tonnage, and the resulting wines already showing polished tannins and loads of flavor.

Our harvest this year began on August 22nd with Pinot Noir for our Kajita Vineyard Rosé, with the Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc following shortly thereafter. This year’s white wine picks were more condensed than usual, which I attribute to a very hot July that accelerated ripening.

This year we also harvested our first Chenin Blanc fruit from the Ryan’s Vineyard in Oak Knoll. We are thrilled to be working with this lesser known (to Napa) variety and look forward to its inaugural release sometime in 2025 – stay tuned for details!

Our first red pick was Merlot from the Muir-Hanna vineyard, and the fruit quality was stunning: tiny berries, concentrated flavors, and perfectly ripe tannins. After three weeks of fermentation in tank, the wine was drained off the skins and into barrels. Even in its earliest days the aromatics are lifted and the mid-palette is juicy and refreshing – qualities that we love in our Merlot.

Back to the Ryan’s Vineyard, this year we had the chance to pick the only Cabernet Sauvignon fruit grown on this 100% organically farmed property. A tiny 0.1 acre block planted to the celebrated “Fay” clone, we are thrilled with the promise of this wine – all 13 gallons of it! As we expect to produce only five cases, it will likely be offered to a small portion of our wonderful wine club. Check out this video of our Cellarmaster Johnny and myself pressing the skins by hand – they don’t make a wine press small enough for this size of a lot!

In The Cellar

All fruit was harvested and in the cellar by the end of September. Our red wines were fermented for three weeks in tanks, with pump overs and pressing completed just before Halloween. The last lot to be pressed off was our Cabernet Franc, which means we no longer have any wines on skins from this vintage – hooray!

At this point, the red wines are sent to barrels where they rest for approximately 18 months to concentrate in flavor, and we can relax a bit as the wines begin malolactic conversion. It’s always a winemaker’s goal to be through primary fermentation and into barrel aging before the holidays, so we feel lucky that is the case for 2024!

Our 2024 white wines were fermented in barrel and have been “dry” (no residual sugar) for over one month. The only work being done on these wines is batonnage; a process whereby the settled yeast lees from the bottom of the barrels is scraped and mixed back into the wine. This practice adds body and texture, and we limit it to approximately one month to preserve fruit and brightness.

Our New Winery Home

This year was the first harvest in our new winery location at Museion Napa – a collaborative custom-crush facility where we are able to join other likeminded small producers to produce our wines. Here, we are able to control every aspect of crush, pressing and barrel storage and keep a close eye on every parcel we produce.

It is also the location of our new Tasting Room which is an easy drive up the Silverado Trail, or if you are feeling ambitious, you can reach it via the Napa Valley Vine Trail cycling trail. We are offering tastings by appointment every day at 11:00 and 2:00.

The end of harvest is always bittersweet for us at Trois Noix. This period of time is the culmination of so much hard work by our vineyard growers, winery partners, and everyone who touches our wines along their journey.

Only through teamwork and collective dedication are we able to produce the wines that we love. We hope you enjoy them too, and thank you for your continued support.

Scroll down for a few more quick hits, and lookout for more updates during the winter months!

Best regards,

Mike Tracy

Trois Noix Out & About

• Tasting: Trois Noix & Miyoko’s & Patagonia Provisions
  Saturday, November 23 @ 4:00pm PST
  770 North Point, San Francisco, CA 94109
  Come and taste the Trois Noix current releases, and meet the TNW team!
• Did you catch us on QUENCH LIVE? 
  Last month, Master Sommelier Andrea Robinson launched her new YouTube channel, and included the 2023 Ryans Sauvignon Blanc in her first show, “Next Gen Napa” covering the “Big 6” grape varieties. You can watch the show HERE.
• Wine Spectator LOVES our Sauvignon Blancs!
  In the latest issue of Wine Spectator magazine, Senior Editor, MaryAnn Worobiec rated both our 2023 Ryan’s and the 2023 Ehrlich Sauvignon Blancs at 93 points. On the Ryan’s Vineyard, MaryAnn commented, “an elegant, complex and sleek mix of juicy Key lime, green papaya and pineapple flavors, with details of crunchy sea salt, lemon balm and litsea oil on the supple finish.” We have a limited quantity of both wines available, so grab a bottle before they sell out.