2020 "Tokyo Love Hotel" Stampede Vineyard Pétillant Naturel - Tank Garage Winery

Blackberry seltzer, pink carnations, crushed pomegranate. Foraged raspberry, tilled soil, juicy nectarine. Spirited bursts of tart and unconventional fruit highlighted by wild strawberry, dirty blueberry, and cranberry radiate with outstanding juiciness and crunch as hints of undergrowth, bramble, and bougainvillea provide subtle yet intriguingly wild undertones. An interesting fleck of ground pepper emerges to impart a playful pinch of spice that is offset by orchard blossoms, hydrangeas, and layers of pretty yet unpretentious floral charm. Impressions of red beets gently materialize in a subtle root vegetable note that fades into earthy impressions of sandy soil and stony minerality. Notably dark and hazy in the glass while coming across as dry, spunky, and quite unconventional on the palate; exhibiting a range of bright and palate-tingling berry fruit further electrified by edgy effervescence. Wonderfully light in body with delicate tannin backed by pronounced acidity. This 2020 "Tokyo Love Hotel" Stampede Vineyard Pétillant Naturel by Tank Garage Winery is a delightfully weird and thoroughly delicious sparkling wine from Lodi's Clement Hills.

Commonly known as "methode ancestral" due to it being the world's most ancient form of sparkling wine, Pétillant Naturel is a unique style accomplished when a wine is bottled before its primary alcoholic fermentation is completed thereby creating effervescence while finishing its ferment in the bottle. This offering, crafted by Tank Garage Winery using a Zinfandel-based old vine field blend sourced from the Stampede Vineyard in the Clement Hills sub-AVA of Lodi, brilliantly showcases this unique wine style through an unlikely yet completely intriguing lens. Coming from a historic vineyard planted in 1928, this wine captures the wild and rugged berry-driven juiciness of its site alongside gorgeous brambliness, pretty floral tones, and surprising earthy notes. Though it possesses the complexity of old vines this simultaneously jumps with the youthful exuberance of Pét Nat, and is honestly unlike anything we've tasted in recent memory. Tons of fun!