2022 Ashanta 'Zazen' Zinfandel

Zinfandel holds a special place for Ashanta. They consider Zin to be one of the historic tentpole grapes of California. Between Chenoa’s italian winemaking ancestry and working their first real harvest under Tony Cotturi, a true champion of Zinfandel, they decided to start a small project within their label as a meditation on the incredible, differing aspects of Zin in California; a grape too often shouldered with a reputation for over ripe typicity. Appropriately they gave this project Noah’s middle name Zazen, which means seated meditation.

Hand picked and sorted the grapes were 100% de-stemmed and crushedinto an open top fermenter. With two weeks of maceration we pressed with a little remaining sugar to finish reaching dryness in French neutral Oak, where the wine was aged in barrel for 20 months to allow the acid and fruit to mellow. Bottled in Hock glass as a nod to the Alpine nature of the fruit and as a way to be a bit subversive with this take of a classic Cali-grape, this Zinfandel has a lot of thenoted typicity of a Cali-Zin with a crystalline, granite-mountain-punk throughline.