Donkey and Goat Carignane

A friend offered us these 120 yr old Carignane vines in late summer and we simply could not resist. Not having made Carignane before we were not sure what to do so we followed our general regimen for making red wines with close monitoring. Meaning we sorted and de-stemmed into our open top wood vats. From there a light foot stomping and then nothing. We added nothing at the vat and let the wild yeast start fermentation naturally which occurred on day 4. Once going, we punched down by hand 2-3x/day until at day 15 we began to worry about the tannins being too strong so we pressed off to neutral FO barrels where fermentation continued until dryness and then through MLF. The wine was racked for the first time in June 2010 for our July bottling.