About the Producer
The Massican (MAH-see-con) white wines are made from 10 grape varieties planted in 17 vineyards on California’s North Coast (north of San Francisco). All our vineyards are farmed at a minimum with sustainable standards and at a maximum with certified organic practices. The winemaking is respectful of the vineyards and the grapes, and therefore, there is little intervention during the fermentation process to convert the sugars in the grapes to the alcohol in the wines. The wines are fresh, bright, light on the palate, less than 100 calories per glass, have no residual or added sugar, and contain limited amounts of sulfites. Let’s dig in a little. Or a lot. (Or just click here for the wine pairings!)
Every grape from every vineyard is hand-harvested and fermented separately. The grapes are harvested at daybreak and then whole-cluster pressed at the winery. We settle the fresh-pressed juice overnight, decant it in the morning to barrels or tanks, and then ferment it with native or cultured yeasts in French oak barrels (80 gallons), stainless steel barrels (75 gallons), or larger oak vessels and stainless steel tanks (multiple sizes).
The ingredients in Massican wines are grapes, yeast (which converts sugar to alcohol), nitrogen (a nutrient that supports yeast development), and sulfur (which is added after fermentation for its antioxidant and antimicrobial properties).
The Massican wines are sugar-free (we ferment all the natural sugars and add no sugar before, during, or after the wine is made). The wines are also gluten-free and vegan. There are no allergens (egg, milk, fish proteins, etc.) in any of the Massican wines.
For your information, we use new French oak barrels for our Hyde Vineyards Chardonnay, which imparts smoky aromas and flavors.
After we blend the wines (in January) and before we bottle them (late February), we sterile-filter them. We do this for two reasons: first, to remove any dead or active yeast cells that may cause the wines to re-ferment in the bottle, and second, this filtration process provides us with crystal-clear wines.
None of the Massican wines receive any fining (clarifying) agents prior to bottling, and they do not undergo cold stabilization to remove tartrates (acid crystals that form when the wine is exposed to excessively cold temperatures; to visualize this, think of a snow globe).
Our wines are bottled in lightweight glass, 468 grams (or 1 lb), and are made from 50% recycled glass produced in California. (If you are familiar with previous bottles of Massican, this is a 20% reduction in the weight of our bottles—in the last two years, we used 70k less lbs of glass and 20 tons less carbon in the creation of these bottles. We’re not done, though. We will continue to make our packaging as environmentally friendly as we can in the years to come.)
