2024 Fioritura ‘Margett Vineyard’ Vermentino Paso Robles, 750ml

Gianna Prainito was raised in San Francisco, but her father’s side of the family all hails from Sicily. As a result of having her dad be a pastry chef while Gianna was growing up, a natural curiosity about food, process, and Italian culture in particular have been in her background since day one. Education at Cal Poly in food science, including four years of work on their didactic organic farm, led Gianna to want to work on various organic farms across Italy: Mt. Etna, the Alps, Campania, and finally Umbria, where Gianna had her first real experience with winemaking, complete with off-the-grid living, horse-drawn harvests, medieval wooden basket press, and all.

 

Returning to the States, Gianna worked harvests in Oregon, in search of wineries with “intentional farming,” as she calls it, and did some years at Soter and Antica Terra, then landed in Chile in 2022 to work harvest with a small biodynamic winery there (and get varied experience!). It’s in Chile where she interviewed with Gina and Mikey of Lady of the Sunshine and Scar of the Sea, our star Central Coast California producers, and the rest is history. Gianna has been working hand-in-hand with Gina and Mikey for three viticultural years and harvests now in a row; 2025 will be her fourth; as Gianna puts it, “it really feels like a home here.”

Organic. Vermentino fruit drawn from the Margett vineyard in North Paso Robles. Grown on sandy loam soils. This harvest was picked at 21 Brix and 3.3 pH. A third of the grapes were foot-tread and soaked on skins for an hour, then went direct to press. Fermented with native yeast in neutral oak barrels, aged on lees for eight months in neutral oak. Bottled unfiltered and unfined, with minimal sulfur. Only 69 cases produced. Notes of lemon zest, honeysuckle, olive oil cake, and sea spray. - Couer