We got home from Las Vegas and almost immediately we received our latest shipment from our wine club “A Taste of Monterey.” We discovered this club during our first visit to Carmel-by-the-Sea when we made a side trip to the city of Monterey, because we were going to eat at the famed Sardine Factory at Cannery Row.  It really doesn’t take much for us to get side-tracked, especially when we are on holidays.  In fact, we also bought a piece of art that is hanging in our living room from that trip as well.  I guess not all the money was fated to be in a 401 account, but boy have we had fun.  We ended up joining the wine club that day and they offered two different club programs.  One was for two bottles to be shipped monthly and these were in the more popular price range.  We decided to go with the Private Reserve Club which entail three bottles of wine quarterly, but they were not in the popular price range.  This is what we wanted to really get a taste of the wines from the region.

Folktale Winery actual roots go back to 1982 when Bob and Patty Brower began Chateau Julien Wine Estate and slowly and surely began growing the estate and the property with the intent of making French style wines in California.  The winery was acquired by Gregory Ahn and renamed Folktale Winery and Vineyards in 2015.  The five-acre estate winery is 100% organic and then they also have three hundred acres in the Arroyo Seco AVA and they grow Pinot Noir and Chardonnay.  The lead winemaker of the team at Folktale Winery is David Baird, who began his own Le Mistral brand back in 1982 and was one of the original Rhone-style producers in the area.

This is the second wine that I have received from the winery, the first being a Chardonnay and the new wine is their Folktale Winery Pinot Noir 2015 from the Arroyo Seco AVA.  The fruit came from three different vineyards that are all rated for being farmed and harvested sustainably.  I couldn’t find any actual production notes on the wine other than the fact that they were aged in neutral French Oak, but there was time schedule of events.  There was a little over eleven-hundred cases produced and their estimate is for an aging potential of five to six years.  I know that we go through a lot of Pinot Noir wines here, so I am sure that it will be opened in that time frame.