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Racines is a collaboration led by Étienne de Montille and Brian Sieve of Burgundy and Rodolphe Péters of Champagne. Étienne and Brian had been on an exploratory trip to California and Oregon in search of a place where they could put down roots for a initial project beyond of France. In the Santa Rita Hills, they found the precision and finesse they were looking for.
A year later Rodolphe Péters, with a similar intent, joined to create a range of sparkling wines, also from the Santa Rita Hills. The team came together to join their individual experiences in hand-crafting wines of purity and transparency to create a range of Pinot Noir and Chardonnay from the cool climate of the Sta. Rita Hills in California. Racines represents the coming together of all that is wondrous about Burgundy, Champagne and California.
For Étienne and Rodolphe, Racines offers the opportunity to create something completely new, liberated from the weight of history that comes with making wine in their own villages in Burgundy and Champagne.
The Racines collection brings with it all the multi-generational perspective of their combined experience, crafted in the ocean driven cool-climate of the Santa Rita Hills, a terroir that has quickly come to be considered among the best in the world for making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
These wines are clearly the work of kindred spirits with complimentary tastes and skills, driven to produce wines of consistent quality and precision that can stand alongside the best produced in France.
For Étienne and Rodolphe, Racines offers the opportunity to create something completely new, liberated from the weight of history that comes with making wine in their own villages in Burgundy and Champagne.
The Racines collection brings with it all the multi-generational perspective of their combined experience, crafted in the ocean driven cool-climate of the Santa Rita Hills, a terroir that has quickly come to be considered among the best in the world for making Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.
These wines are clearly the work of kindred spirits with complimentary tastes and skills, driven to produce wines of consistent quality and precision that can stand alongside the best produced in France.
While very much an expression of this unique terroir, the Racines wines exhibit some different qualities to those we have come to expect from the Santa Rita Hills.
Pinot Noirs — employing whole-cluster fermentation, adding elegance, lift and spiciness, combined with pigéage throughout fermentation, offering a burlier, more extracted flavor profile, with more weight, volume and exceptional aging potential.
Chardonnays — grown several miles from the ocean in ancient marine sea-beds, giving these wines a sense of energy, transparency and precision, and the advantage of being crafted with the techniques and expertise of hundreds of years of Burgundian and Champagnes winemaking.
“After more than fifteen years of consulting throughout the world and numerous partnership requests outside of France, the wines of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs that I discovered from Santa Barbara, finally got me to select these magnificent terroirs in the Sta. Rita Hills to produce, for the first time, limited quantities of my own Sparklings within the Racines project.”
– Rodolphe Péters
“After more than fifteen years of consulting throughout the world and numerous partnership requests outside of France, the wines of Chardonnays and Pinot Noirs that I discovered from Santa Barbara, finally got me to select these magnificent terroirs in the Sta. Rita Hills to produce, for the first time, limited quantities of my own Sparklings within the Racines project.”
– Rodolphe Péters
