You are bidding on One (1) Bottle of Tenbrink Winery, an artisan winery, Suisun Valley Pinto Noir 2006.

This Pinot smells of the soil and the work of the farmer. The aim of the wine making has been to preserve and present the force of the vineyard and its farmer, not the charm of the sun-ripe fruit. It is a wine of presence and depth and seriousness.

90 cases produced

This wine revealed its depth only in its maturation. it tastes and smells as much of the yeasts as it does of ripe, apple-y fruit. Its complexity is the complexity of wine; the smells and tastes tell the story of fermentation, aging, of a wine settling into itself. This wine does not so much present the vineyard as the transformation of the vineyard, and preserves its fruit in another form.

The fruit for this wine was harvested from the vineyard adjacent to the Tenbrink's Scholium Project Babylon vineyard. The vines are planted on St. George rootstock, minimally irrigated, and thinned rigorously. The fruit was harvested in two lots separated by eight days. It was whole cluster pressed and fermented in 100% neutral French oak. We experimented with placing the barrels in the Tenbrink's peach and cherry refrigerator during fermentation to slow the process down as much as possible. The wines completed fermentation around the first of the year and matured for another 9 months before bottling. During that time the wines were never racked or sulfured.

Tenbrink Vineyards and Winery is on Facebook.  Click here to go and join their group.

TENBRINK HISTORY

The Tenbrink family farms 52 acres of walnuts, fruit orchards, tomatoes and 50 of vineyards in the paradise of Suisun Valley. Suisun is just on the other side of the mountains east of Napa, just west of the Sacramento and San Joaquin delta wetlands. it is an old farming land with mixed agriculture, dominated still, as it was three generations ago, by small family farms raising several crops. The Tenbrinks have been raising fruit for more than 25 years; their lives are rooted in their fields and ordered by the daily cycle of the sun and the yearly cycle of the growing seasons. The Tenbrinks do not just farm, they feed. their home is always open, their table full of guests, the local youth in the driveway seeing what Linda has cooking or out on the counter. Beer in the cooler, wine on the table. From 2006 on, some of the wine on the table has been theirs.

In 2002 they sold grapes to Luna Vineyards in Napa for the first time; in 2003 Luna made a single-vineyard wine from their Petite Sirah. In gratitude for making the connection to Luna, the Tenbrinks gave a ton of their Petite Sirah to Abe Schoener, then the winemaker at Luna. He gratefully accepted the grapes for his own little business, the Scholium Project. From them, he made a crazy, dark red wine, so wild and so intense that he felt obliged to give it a name that made clear how far it was from the civilized wines of Napa. he called it Babylon. with that gift was born a great partnership. the Tenbrink's babylon vineyard is now the anchor of the scholium project's red wine making, and abe is now the Tenbrink's winemaker for their own wines. in 2007, they manifested the courage and imagination to build their own facility. Abe gets to run it, and it is the home for his wines, Maldonado Family vineyards, and the projects of two friends: Jason Berthold's Courier wines, and Grayson Hartley's yet unnamed project. The new Tenbrink winery is a simple, wonderful, happy home for all of this wine. it is has a past rooted in family's fruit and vegetable farming and a future that looks unbounded.

It is pretty clear that he Abe's role in the wine making is somewhere between teacher and custodian: within a year or two, Steve Tenbrink will be all the winemaker the family needs.

High-profile wine

High-profile wine
By Ben Antonius | Daily Republic | May 31, 2009



FAIRFIELD - It started, perhaps ironically, in Napa Valley.

That's where Steve and Linda Tenbrink, scions of a longtime Suisun Valley farming family, met vintner Abe Schoener, who has built his reputation on a style of experimental winemaking aimed directly at challenging long-held Napa traditions.

Between them, Schoener and the Tenbrinks have formed a relationship that is putting Suisun Valley grapes on their grandest stage yet.

'We are trying to really build the Suisun Valley into being a well-known place that is as good, if not better, than Napa,' Linda Tenbrink said.

These days, Schoener works in Suisun Valley as winemaker at the Tenbrinks' fledgling vineyard. Through an agreement with the family, he also uses their winery for a side effort called Scholium Project, a nationally-recognized undertaking. Its wines have been variously described as 'bizarre' and 'fascinating.'

'Half the wines it makes in any given year are exquisite. The other half are shocking and sometimes undrinkable,' the New York Times reported after a Scholium tasting at the Suisun Valley winery.

In years past, that level of attention would have been an unheard-of development, but it is a welcome one. Growers in the valley have long argued that they were held back not by the quality of their grapes or the skill of their winemaking, but by the lack of prestige afforded to the appellation compared to the adjacent Napa and Sonoma valleys.

It's an assessment both the Tenbrinks and Schoener share.

For his part, Schoener isn't sure how much Scholium Project is doing to actually raise the profile of the region. He only uses Suisun Valley grapes in one of Scholium's many wines, a petite sirah called Babylon. He also said the area is starting to get attention without his help, noting a recent high-profile review of a Suisun Valley wine called Manifesto!

'To some degree the wines of Suisun Valley . . . are becoming better known on their own,' he said. 'It is also true that I had the wine writer of the New York Times visit the Tenbrink winery and taste for two hours. That probably wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for the Scholium Project.'

The Tenbrink family -- who also produce tomatoes, peaches and walnuts -- has grown wine grapes for more than a decade. However, it wasn't until recent years the family explored producing wine themselves.

See the complete story at the Daily Republic online.

Posted by Solano EDC  (www.solanoedc.com)