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WINEMAKING The vineyard has been organically certi- fied and dry-farmed for more than two decades; plantings now cover 12 acres, with small parcels of Cabernet Sauvignon, Petite Sirah and Petit Verdot added to the original Zin over the years. Tres Sabores also grows olives, Meyer lemons and "exotic pomegranate cultivars." A barn on the property was converted into a small winery facility, bonded in 1989, to provide overflow capacity for Frog's Leap. Since 1999 the vineyard and winery have been devoted to the Tres Sabores wines. Taylor-Bailey Construc- tion updated the pint-sized crush pad area. Johnson and her new husband, Jon Engelskirger, live on the property, where Cabernet vines grow in the front yard. The older Zinfandel vines are still on the original AXR-1 rootstock, with no phylloxera trouble in sight. Johnson's theory is that the dry-farmed vines send their roots deep for water, beyond the zone in which phylloxera causes trouble. "If we lose a vine," she says, "it's from eutypa." A picking team could easily harvest this whole vineyard in a day, but instead John- son picks the core Zinfandel in five or six sessions, moving up the hillside in tune with the ripening. She's also discovered that the edges of the vineyards, which have shal- lower soils than the middle parts, ripen dif- ferently, so they get picked separately, too. Sorting at harvest is just as meticulous as the choice of picking days. Johnson and her personal crew do a first pass, weeding out damaged and underripe clusters; as the regular crew brings grapes to collec- tion bins, they get another look; finally, the grapes are picked over on a Bucher Vaslin sorting table, from which they travel up an incline to a Delta E1 destemmer-crusher, purchased used and maintained by KLR Machines. Much of Johnson's equipment was purchased used, and she credits Vicki Mastbaum of Transition Equipment with helping locate a lot of it. Selective crushing Johnson employs the crusher differently depending on the grape variety. Zinfandel simply gets destemmed; punch downs break up the thin skins, and Johnson likes the addition of a small amount of carbonic maceration within the berries during fermentation. Some of the thicker skinned Petite Sirah is crushed, and some is left as whole berries. All the Cabernet gets crushed, since Johnson can't depend on punch downs or cold soaks to get everything out of the thicker skins. Fermentations are conducted in standard T bins, with hand punch downs. Many of the reds go through a cold-soak period for two to seven days and are then moved in- side to barrel storage areas where ambient temperatures are well below 60ºF. (John- son says she wishes she had space to move bins in and out at night to take advantage of cooler temperatures.) She is fond of wild fermentations, but when in doubt she makes use of commercial yeasts from Laf- Tres Sabores owner-winemaker Julie Johnson field tests some of her organically certified grapes (lower left.) Outdoor fermentation is photo- graphed in progress (lower right) at the St. Helena winery. WINES & VINES SEPTEMBER 2012 47 CYNDY WHITMORE