2020 Mari Vineyards 'Simplicissimus' Sparkling Riesling Old Mission Peninsula

Winemaker Notes: The 2020 vintage is clean and crisp with refreshing fruitiness. Lemon curd, pineapple, and green apple notes add a ripeness to this otherwise bone dry wine. Made from a cooler year’s harvest, the Riesling grapes were perfect for sparkling wine and evolved into, what we think is, our best vintage of Simplicissimus yet! Celebrate by enjoying the Simplicissimus as a apéritif, or pair with seafood like briny oysters and flavors like ginger and lemongrass. “What does sparkling wine not go with?” - Sean O’Keefe. Designed to be enjoyed now, but could age to 2027 . 

The wine was made in the ancestral method in a very hands-off style. The grapes were harvested from Jamieson on October 6th 2020. Non-traditional yeast Torulaspore Delbrueckii was used to ferment the base wine, with no further additions besides the ambient cellar yeasts already existing in the environment. Primary fermentation was halted early by chilling the juice, leaving 22 g/L of naturally occurring residual sugar. The wine aged sur lee in the tank for four months, adding to the body and complexity of the base. We then lightly filtered this base wine and on February 28th, 2021 we sent it to Bonobo Winery to be bottled with a crown cap. It returned to us one week later, underwent secondary fermentation, and aged for nineteen months on its bottle lees. Starting October 5th, 2022 the first round of bottles were sent to Bonobo for riddling, disgorging, and topping off with more of the same wine to finish.

Simplicissimus is a difficult way of saying something simple. This thought can be applied to how we made Simplicissimus. The “hands off” approach and unique fermentation was a more complex way to create this wine than the usual traditional method. The name has multiple inspiring origins, two of which are detailed below:

• Simplicissimus was a German Satirical magazine published from 1896 -1967 that featured bright, bold, and artistically modern graphics Winemaker Sean O’Keefe enjoys. It published outspoken politically daring works from writers who were critical of rigid Prussian military figures and German social and class distinctions. 
• The name originally stems from a book titled Simplicius Simplicissimus from 1669, known as a picaresque novel—a fiction genre depicting the adventures of witty or roguish lower social class heroes in corrupt societies. It was inspired by the events and horrors of the Thirty Year War which devastated Germany from 1618 to 1648, and is regarded as the first adventure novel in the German language and the first German novel masterpiece.