Alexander Russan started his wine import company, Alexander Jules, back in 2012 with the creation of his own barrel selected Sherry labels, and has grown into Spanish wine import company, focusing on small, organic, family producers, making fresh and elegant wines, often from rare grape varietals. In order to ‘feed’ his wine obsession, Alex started Metrick Wine, it’s his attempt to wrap his brain around winemaking as much as one can in a single lifetime – and make fresh interesting wines along the way.
Alex’s approach to winemaking is, first and foremost, to encourage a great wine that is representative of the time and place from which it comes from. He believes in doing the minimum necessary to encourage a stable, age worthy, hopefully beautiful wine, with high degree of precision. The primary goal is to avoid anything that would overshadow the character coming from the vineyards by: meticulous cleanliness, spontaneous fermentation, aging in neutral vessels and minimal filtration.
In the vineyards, Alex works with his growers to maintain leaf coverage. By protecting the grapes from the harsh Southern California sun, more delicate and diverse aromatics are maintained: herbs and earth in reds, floral, citric and stony in whites.
At bottling, reds are unfined and unfiltered, whites see very gentle bentonite fining, and are only filtered if did not go through malolactic fermentation.