Licorne Méchante Carignan Cri du Loup 2024

Shaunt Oungoulian and Diego Roig are UC Davis enology graduates who spent formative time working in France before founding their California projects together. Oungoulian trained with Philippe Valette in the Mâconnais and with Julie Balagny in Fleurie, two producers with technically rigorous, non-interventionist approaches to winemaking. Roig gained experience at Domaine Léon Barral in the Faugères zone of the Languedoc and at the COS estate in Sicily, both recognized as foundational estates for the European natural wine movement. The combination of Burgundian precision and southern French and Sicilian low-intervention practice shaped how both men think about farming and the cellar.

Back in California, they co-founded Les Lunes Wine and Populis Wines in 2014, working initially out of the basement of Oungoulian's parents' house in Orinda, east of the San Francisco Bay, chosen specifically because it was free of other wineries' microbial populations and would allow native yeast fermentations to proceed without competition. Les Lunes focuses on wines from their own organically farmed vineyard holdings in Napa and Sonoma. Populis draws on purchased fruit from trusted organic and dry-farmed growers across California, particularly in Mendocino County.

Licorne Méchante, which translates as "wicked unicorn," was created as the outlet for experiments and lots that fell outside the two main labels in style or ambition. The Cri du Loup, or "Cry of the Wolf," has been the most consistent and recognized release under the Licorne Méchante name since its debut vintage in 2016. The title plays off the Les Lunes brand identity, connecting the wolf's cry to the full moon that inspired the main label's name.

Each Cri du Loup vintage is vinified with more than 30 days of whole-stem maceration using native ambient yeasts, then aged in a combination of neutral oak and stainless steel before an extended period in bottle prior to release. No fining, no filtration, and minimal sulfur are the consistent parameters.

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Mendocino County stretches from California's Pacific coastline east into the coastal ranges and inland valleys of the North Coast, roughly 100 miles north of San Francisco. It is one of the most geographically varied wine counties in the state, spanning conditions from the cool, fog-saturated reaches of the Anderson Valley, which opens toward the ocean near Boonville, to the warm, sun-heavy inland zones around Ukiah, Hopland, and Calpella. That thermal spectrum, spread across a county of fewer than 10,000 wine acres, gives producers access to a genuinely diverse range of growing environments within a short drive.

Calpella occupies the upper Ukiah Valley, a few miles north of Ukiah along the Russian River, at an elevation of roughly 620 ft. The valley here is defined by what it once was: a riverbed. The Russian River has migrated over thousands of years, leaving behind alluvial deposits of rounded river gravel, quartz, and sandstone compacted into the Pinole gravelly loam soils that underlie the Venturi Vineyard. These soils are stony, free-draining, and low in fertility, encouraging vines to push roots deep rather than grow laterally, a dynamic that suits old, dry-farmed head-trained vines particularly well.

Carignan arrived in Mendocino County with the Italian and Spanish immigrant farming families of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Planted widely as a blending grape, it was largely overlooked in the era of varietal bottling that followed Prohibition, and much of the old-vine acreage was pulled out. What remained, including the Venturi Vineyard's 1948 planting, now represents an increasingly rare viticultural resource. Mendocino County became the first county in California to ban aerial pesticide spraying in 1989 and today holds more certified organic vineyard acreage than any other California county, a fact that has drawn a growing community of natural winemakers to its old-vine sites.