LIOCO INDICA RED ( PRACTICING ORGANIC)

Lioco wines were born out of ideas that germinated in the alley behind Spago-Beverly Hills in 2001. Matt Licklider was the national sales director for North Berkeley Imports, and Kevin O’Connor was the Wine Director at Spago.

The pair would taste wine in the alley, spitting in the rain gutter, and talk about the wines they loved and lament that there weren’t enough domestic wines that fit their preferences: lower alcohol, less sugar, and putting elegance and nuance before power.

Those conversations and the resulting friendship gave birth to Lioco in 2005.  They’ve been at the avant-garde of the current trend of wine-making that champions less intervention in the process and looks to the California wines of the 1980s (and older) as well as European wines as benchmarks.

Farming is, at a minimum, sustainable. All grapes are hand-picked and sorted.  

All fruit was hand-harvested in late September. It was foot tread and fermented beneath a ‘submerged cap’ on 100% whole clusters during an 18-day fermentation. It spent 10 months in neutral oak prior to bottling.

From two historic Mendocino County vineyards—one with 70-year-old, dry-farmed Carignan (93%) pitched on an exposed, rocky slope at 2,400 feet; the other with 75+-year-old Valdiguié (7%) farmed on clay soils in a cool, upland valley. These rapidly vanishing California grape varieties harken back to the Golden State’s earliest winemaking efforts.