MEET THE WINEMAKER

Arquiles Carlos Caruncho

I was born and brought up in Cuba, attended university in Russia, defected from Cuba at 27 while en route to Russia, lived in Canada for a year, crossed into America in 1991, and finally received refugee status in 1992.

I had fallen in love with wines at age nine when I was offered a small glass of Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon during Noche Buena—our version of ‘Thanksgiving’ in Cuba. By 1992, finding myself in Northern California, I worked for five years with an already stablished winemaker, taking part in all aspects of wine production.

Later, I took wine chemistry courses at UC Davis, planted a small vineyard in 2003, and produced my first wine in 2007.

In the summer of 2008, I moved ‘en famille’ to Oxford, England where, in 2012, I completed the Third level of WSET course with Michael Palij, Master of Wines. Currently, I am finishing the Fourth Level of WSET at the Napa Valley Wine Academy. While living in the England, I travelled extensively and tasted wines all over Europe, expanding my knowledge. By then, I was fluent in five languages, and this helped.

On my return to Northern California in 2015, I took over a 45–year-old abandoned, uncertified organic vineyard of four acres in Nevada County, on the Western Slope of the Sierra. This offered me two acres of Chardonnay and two of Sauvignon Blanc. With relentless hard work, I have managed to bring back this vineyard to a point where I am dry farming it, using organic sulfur to a bare minimum, along with biodynamic compost and preps, doing all vineyard work manually, and focusing on small crops for concentration over quantity. Presently, I harvest just one ton per vineyard.

White grapes are carefully hand-picked, gently crushed/de-stemmed, the must is left to rest for 24 hours before being manually transferred into Stainless Steel fermenters or neutral French Oak barrels for a long, natural ,cool fermentation (13 C). All wines are undisturbed from beginning to end, unfiltered, unrefined, unracked. Zero sulfites.

My red grapes are always locally and sustainably grown, hand-picked and carefully selected. Half of them stomped and half of them crushed/de-stemmed. I naturally co-ferment them for up to 15 days, then gently press and manually transfer to neutral or re-cooped French Oak barrels. Red wines stay undisturbed in barrels anywhere from 12–26 months, unracked, unfiltered, unrefined until bottling, and zero sulfites. All reds are released after five to six months of being bottled.

In January 2021, while on a short trip to the UK, I delivered two of my wines to two of the world’s finest wine critics: Jancis Robinson and Michael Palij.

Here’s what they said:

“Light to mid garnet. Sweet and quite rich start, the nose is surprisingly Pinot-like. Sweet and then fine. Really quite smooth and delicate. More like an old-vine Spanish Garnacha than a California wine though to a certain extent you can taste the California sunshine. Long and seductive. Very juicy and charming. Quite long…” — Jancis Robinson

“Beautiful, sweet bramble fruit, black currant, plum, wild strawberry, coffee, black pepper, liquorice, nutmeg, cardamom, sweet autumn spice, beautiful length’.”— Michael Palij