Ruth Lewandowski Feints 2024

Ruth Lewandowski Wines was founded in 2012 by Evan Lewandowski, a winemaker who grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, and discovered wine seriously while attending the University of Utah. His path eventually took him to Alsace, where he worked for several seasons at Domaine Binner, gaining hands-on experience in organic and biodynamic viticulture and natural winemaking. When he returned to the United States, he began building a wine project rooted in two core convictions: that wine made from organically farmed grapes with genuine human attention expresses its origin faithfully, and that the cellar's job is to stay out of the way.

The winery draws its name and its ethos from the Book of Ruth in the Old Testament. The story's central themes of gleaning, loyalty, and finding purpose in another's harvest field mirror Lewandowski's own practice of sourcing from other growers' vineyards and working with the character each season and site provides. His principal sources are Fox Hill Vineyard and Testa Vineyard in Mendocino County, both organically farmed heritage sites with vine plantings that reflect the vision of their respective owners rather than commercial considerations.

The Feints label, drawing on the same Italian varieties planted at Fox Hill in the late 1980s, has become one of Ruth Lewandowski's most recognizable wines — a co-fermented carbonic field blend that changes slightly in composition each vintage as Lewandowski incorporates additional varieties from the vineyard alongside the core Arneis, Dolcetto, Barbera, and Nebbiolo. Everything in the cellar is done without additions: no sulfur, no fining agents, no filtration. Wines are bottled when Lewandowski judges them ready, after several months on their lees.

Explore more Ruth Lewandowski wines at Primal Wine: Rosé Cuvée Zero, Tatto Skin Contact, Boaz Carignan, and Anos. Discover more in our best-selling natural wines collection.

Mendocino County sits at the northern end of California's North Coast wine corridor, above Sonoma County and below the Oregon border. The county encompasses a wide range of growing conditions across its valleys and ridges: the cold, fog-driven Anderson Valley in the far west, which is well suited to Pinot Noir, Chardonnay, and sparkling wine; the warmer Ukiah Valley and Redwood Valley further inland, which have historically been associated with Zinfandel, Carignan, and Grenache; and the Yorkville Highlands in the south, a cooler high-elevation zone gaining attention for its aromatic varieties and structured reds.

Fox Hill Vineyard, the source of the fruit for Ruth Lewandowski Feints 2024, is located in the Mendocino AVA proper, on the Talmage Bench between the towns of Hopland and Ukiah. The bench sits just above the Russian River floodplain and is composed of uplifted former riverbed sediment, with predominantly sandstone-based, rocky, pebbly soils containing a significant proportion of quartz. These well-drained, low-fertility soils limit vine vigor and produce grapes of concentrated flavor at relatively modest yields. The vineyard sits at around 650 feet above sea level, which provides a moderate altitude benefit without pushing into the cool-climate extremes of higher ridgeline sites.

What makes Fox Hill distinctive in the California wine landscape is its variety composition. Owner Lowell Stone replanted the property in the late 1980s almost entirely to Italian varieties sourced from nurseries and personal connections, creating a site that functions as a repository for Piedmontese, Venetian, and other northern Italian grape varieties rarely planted in California. This makes it a primary source for producers like Ruth Lewandowski who are looking to work outside the mainstream California variety palette.

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