Same Verb, No Lancet
TASTING NOTES: “Our 2025 Rosé is both a blend of varieties and a blend of Rosé winemaking techniques. Carefully managed Rosé sections of our estate vineyard Cabernet Sauvignon and Cabernet Franc were direct pressed and fermented together to create vibrant color, acidity, and bright fruit flavors. The growing season also provided ideal conditions for natural acidity in fully ripe fruit, and therefore the opportunity to craft a stellar saignée Rosé. We pulled juice from our red fermentations immediately after the grapes were destemmed. This technique leads to Rosé with a richer palate and deeper color. By fermenting our direct-press and saignée wines separately and blending them post-fermentation, we created the perfect balance of freshness, vivid fruit aromas, and a full palate.” (AbV 13.1%)
VARIETALS: 60% Cabernet Franc, 40% Cabernet Sauvignon
BARRELS: 60% saignée, 40% direct press. 100% stainless steel fermentation.
PAIRS WITH: N/A
THAT REMINDS ME OF: Saignée.
That’s the French word for “bled” — the technique of drawing off juice from a red fermentation early to concentrate what’s left, and the exact verb, “saigner,” that Western doctors used for centuries when bloodletting was the default treatment for basically everything: fever, headache, bad mood, existential dread. The reasoning rested on the four humors — too much blood, called plethora, was itself diagnosed as the disease, and the fix was a lancet and a bowl. George Washington got the full treatment during his final illness in 1799: several separate bloodlettings within about ten hours, several pints of blood removed total, a meaningful chunk of what he had. His doctors were doing state-of-the-art medicine. He died anyway, which in hindsight reads less like bad luck and more like a controlled experiment nobody signed up for.
Bloodletting stuck around as legitimate practice well into the 1800s, and the barber pole — red and white stripes — is a fossil of that era: barbers moonlighted as surgeons, red for blood, white for the bandages. Somewhere between then and now, the same act of “bleeding something off” got rehabilitated from a desperate last resort into a precise, intentional move a winemaker chooses on purpose. Same verb, wildly different confidence level.
PRODUCER PODCAST: Dineen Vineyards Rosé (2:39)
