Wine of the week: Fat Dragon, 2023 Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County Rosé

Setting your vineyard up for success will temper the caprice of Mother Nature.

This is the advice Dani Price said she and her husband, fellow co-vintner Mike Price, live by with their new label Fat Dragon.

“Losses can and do happen and what we’ve heard over and over is to just take all the steps you can,” said Price. “One example is we added a new agricultural well so that in heat spikes like we just experienced these past couple of weeks we can irrigate the entire vineyard in less than 24 hours … That’s really important for the vines and particularly at this point in the growing season.”

Price is behind our wine of the week winner — Fat Dragon, 2023 Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County Rosé, 49% Grenache and 51% Mourvedre, 13.2% alcohol, $35. A striking rosé with pitch perfect balance, it has aromas and flavors of strawberry, cranberry, grapefruit and mineral. And this well-crafted rosé finishes crisp.

“The goal with our rosé is to emulate some of the great rosé wines of the Bandol region of France that we love so much,” Price said. “Bandol wines are often dominated by the same Grenache and Mourvèdre grapes that we use for Fat Dragon’s rosé.”

The vintner said what gives their rosé the edge is that it falls into the “intentional” camp.

“ A lot of people don’t know that many rosé wines are actually created sort of as an afterthought,” Price explained. “It’s a byproduct of red wine production using what is called the saignée method. This means that you pick your red wine grapes later and at a higher brix (sugar) level to produce red wine, but you bleed off some of the free run juice in the tank to make a rosé wine.”

At Fat Dragon, the vintner said, the Grenache and Mourvèdre grapes are picked a few weeks earlier and at a lower brix (sugar) level for its rosés versus its reds.

With 450 cases produced, the Fat Dragon label has a fetching lineup of wine, predominantly Rhone varietals crafted by winemaker Luke Stanko at Windsor’s Grand Cru Custom Crush.

The label name comes with its own back story: Price’s 2008 visit to the Happy Valley Racetrack in Hong Kong, where she bet on a horse called Fat Dragon, drawn to it simply by the name. Its odds: 44 to 1.

It won and Price is determined to follow Fat Dragon’s lead, no matter what the obstacle.

The co-vintners lost their home last month, possibly from embers that blew in from the Point Fire, although the cause is still being investigated.

But Price said her unflappable optimism keeps her in good spirits.

She noted that nothing else on their 30-acre property just south of Healdsburg — the vineyard, two guest cottages and a barn — was damaged.

“We’re just getting started,” Price said. “We’re so excited to share Fat Dragon with the world.”

You can reach Wine Writer Peg Melnik at 707-521-5310 or peg.melnik@pressdemocrat.com. On X (Twitter) @pegmelnik.