The Vena Cava Estate
- Vena Cava is a boutique winery founded in 2005 by Phil and Eileen Gregory under the principles of passion and quality over quantity. While they didn’t start with the intention of making “natural” wines, the more they learned the more this seemed the only interesting route forward. Today they are among the standouts of wineries in Mexico that are making exceptional wines in a “natural” style. While the estate makes wines that are strictly natural and others that are organic and noninterventionist (yet still apply some conventional techniques), we offer only their purely natural wines.
- All Vena Cava wines that have “Crystal Ship" or“Natural” as part of the name are made with organic grapes, fermented with native yeast, see no corrections, fining or additives and are bottled unfiltered with only a minimal amount of sulfites.
- While Vena Cava has its own estate vineyards, they have focused their business model on creating deep relationships with the best growers and the best vineyard sites such that, today, only 10% of their wines come from their estate owned grapes.
Vineyard locations, elevations and grape varieties –
- In addition to their 9.8 acres of estate vineyards located next to the winery in Valle de Guadalupe, they source their grapes from a number of select sites in Valle de Ojos Negros, Valle de San Vicente and Valle de Santo Tomás. All are organically farmed.
Total production: 10 regular wines and 10 “experimental” wines that change occasionally from vintage to vintage, 2,000 cases
2022 Crystal Ship Sauvignon Blanc - Vena Cava
Tasting Notes and Drinking Window:
The first Sauvignon Blanc to be made exclusively from grapes harvested from the estate’s organically farmed estate vineyards, this takes earlier expressions of zero/zero Sauvignon Blanc to a new level with a wild expression of tropical fruits blended as if in a salsa with fresh cut herbs, and tropical floral expressions. In the mouth this vintage reads less weighty than its predecessors with higher acidity and lower alcohol. A fantastic example of an natural Sauvignon Blanc from Valle de Guadalupe.
150 cases made
Drinking window: Now - 5 years
Vintage:
2022
Blend:
100% Sauvignon Blanc
Producer:
Vena Cava
Winemaker:
Phil Gregory - British, lives in Mexico
Vineyards:
Valle de Guadalupe - Estate vines planted in 2015. Organically farmed in soils of caly with some decomposed granite. Elevation 950 ft.
Winemaking:
Fermentation occurred in open top neutral French oak barrels with 20% whole clusters and stems. Native yeast fermented the wine for a period of three weeks and it continued to rest in the tank for another 3 months before bottling. The wine is bottled unfined and unfiltered.
Sulfites: no sulfites are added at any point during the process.
Farming:
Organic, natural, sustainable
Alcohol:
12.3%
