Solle Wines: Deliciousness over Dogma.

California wine is in the nascent stage of a change in style from powerful high-octane, over-oaked “Big Flavor” wines to the present day “minimalist” winemaking trend of low-sulphur, lower alcohol, native yeast fermented, unfiltered wines.

So which camp is Solle Wines in?

Well, we produced our first completely unfiltered chardonnay back in 2005 and ever since we’ve used almost no new-oak, only native yeast fermentations, and very minimal sulfur in our winemaking.

Do we do it because it’s cool and trendy? Nope.

Look we appreciate that less sulfur is better so we try to minimize its use. However, white wines aged on their lees can become reductive and we believe it is better to add a little sulfur and bottle a delicious chardonnay than follow a doctrine that eschews its use and risk delivering an off bottle of wine that smells of burned rubber and cheese (yummy!).

Also, we previously blindly preached a minimalist mantra and bottled our chards without any filtration (2005-2012). Starting now we will lightly filter all of our white wines. Why? Our customers and restaurant accounts requested we do so. Turns out what we pleasantly refer to as “unfiltered bottle haze” our customers refer to as “gunk,” “muck,” “sh*t at the bottom of the bottle” and they let us know they do not want to see it. And a quick trial demonstrated to us there was little to no difference in flavor, so why not filter?

In the end, I guess it is like anything in life. There are some who have no problem adhering to the strict dictates of a particular movement and there are others (like us) who prefer to pick and choose the best parts of different movements and create their own style.

And what is the Solle Wines style?

We prefer balanced wines with energy, and little to no oak influence, with refreshing acidity, and lower alcohol levels. That said, we are not afraid to employ modern winemaking techniques in the winery to the extent they do not mask the authenticity or sense-of-place inherent in our wines. Which in the end is just a long way of saying, we make f*cking delicious wines yo!