Hiyu Moondog, 2021

Columbia Gorge Red Wine

Place: An amphitheater that captures the sun beside the pond and the cool air rising from the river. Color: Pigeon Blood Ruby Taste: A delicate and ethereal infusion of sour cherry, five spice, rose and truffle. Culture: Babette’s feast. Genetics: Burgundian

This is the parcel to the East of Cornus and below Arco Iris. It’s a half acre bowl, below the pond in one of the coolest positions on the farm. The air from the river below fills the bowl and connect the parcel to the mountain. It ripens two weeks later than Arco Iris and always presents a dark and mysterious counterpoint to that wine’s overt tones of ripe fruit. Like Cornus, it’s planted to Burgundian varieties: over thirty different heirloom clones of Pinot Noir, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Chardonnay and Aligote. The Pinot clones are mostly types of “Pinot Fin” with small berries and extremely loose bunches. The parcel usually sets right around one ton per acre. In the early years of the farm we tended to work with Pinot Noir more like it was Barolo, with very long macerations and aging in barrel. Those wines are haunting with their sepia tones, patina of wood and aromas of spice and deep forest. As our new field blends started to produce fruit in 2016 we began to have access to other grapes suited toward making that kind of wine and we started to pursue a more traditional and understated direction for the pinot based wines. This also coincided with a long string of cooler vintages, which are more conducive to working in this way. It’s taken us a few years to sort out the approach, but it all came together around the coolest vintage we’ve seen to date on the farm in 2019. For us more than anything this has become a meditation or way to connect with how we imagine the monk’s made wine in Burgundy during the middle ages. There are many tapestries from the period that depict the process of fermenting in open top wood vats, treading by foot during the fermentation, pressing with small wooden presses and bucketing the newly fermented wine into barrel by hand. This is how we work with this wine and we feel like it connects us to the wine and the parcel in the deepest and most spiritual way possible. The juice coming out of the press at the end is truly unlike the flavors that occur anywhere else in the winemaking process. It feels almost like black and white film. The sour cherries, rose and truffle are there but somehow experienced as desaturated nostalgia.