2022 Broc Cellars "Amore Blendo" Red, Mendocino County, California, USA

ABOUT THIS WINE

The Amore Blendo is a quintessential Italian table wine. This refreshing blend of Sangiovese Piccolo, Dolcetto and Ribolla Gialla creates a light-bodied wine that pairs amicably with most foods or enjoyed on its own. This vintage is particularly special because all three grape varieties are harvested from Fox Hill Vineyards in Mendocino, which winemaker Chris Brockway has farmed since 2020. This year’s blend is full Italian too, replacing the Sauvignon Blanc from our prior vintage with a pleasantly grippy, forest fruit-driven Sangiovese Piccolo.

True to an Italian field blend, the Sangiovese, Dolcetto and Ribolla Gialla were all harvested on the same day in mid-September. All three varieties were pressed together into concrete tanks for co-fermentation. Once natural fermentation finished, the wine was transferred into neutral oak barrique to age for five months before bottling.

ABOUT THIS PRODUCER

Chris Brockway came to call Berkeley home (for his cellar anyways) by way of Omaha, Nebraska, where he was born and raised, Seattle, and finally Los Angeles, with a couple short stops in between. After graduating from the University of Nebraska, he began working in restaurants around the city before decamping to the Pacific Northwest, where he ultimately became interested in wine. After a friend joked that he should learn how to actually make it, he packed his things and enrolled in winemaking courses at UC Davis. He finished his studies and quickly landed a job at JC Cellars, by all means a conventional winery. At the same time he began to frequent Terroir, San Francisco’s first natural wine bar, and began to think a lot about experimenting with the wines he liked to drink. And so, with a few small experiments, Broc Cellars was born.