Field Recordings Fiction 2015

We love a field blend. It makes us think of an era before industrialised farming where times were simpler, where after a hard day’s work of hunting woolly-mammoths, writing paleo cookbooks and being cockney rhyming slang for trouble, they’d sit back, and drink wine fermented from the grapes that nature provided them.
Winemaker Andrew Jones has a similar practice when he makes Fiction red blend (although we imagine his car isn’t powered by him running on the road. He selects the parcels of grapes in his vineyards that have performed best and then blends them altogether, thus each vintage will have an entirely different varietal make up. This year, however, it is a mix of Zinfandel, Syrah, Mourvedre, Graciano, Cabernet Sauvignon, Touriga Nacional, Carignan, delivering a full and complex palate of ripe dark berries, eucalyptus, liquorice and cigar box.
Field Recordings is 35-year old winemaker Andrew Jones’ personal catalogue of the people and places he values most. Spending his days as a vine nursery field-man, planning and planting vineyards for farmers all over California, Andrew is sometimes offered small lots of their best fruit on the side. Having stood in just about every vineyard on the Central Coast, he has a keen eye for diamonds in the rough: sites that are unknown or under-appreciated but hold enormous untapped potential. As friendships are made and opportunities are embraced, Andrew produces small quantities of soulful wine from these unusual, quiet vineyards.
The Field Recordings wines are a catalogue of single vineyard sites that produces wines with a sense of place and personality. In addition to the single vineyard wines, multi-vineyard blends are put together under the Wonderwall, Alloy Wine Works and FICTION labels.