100% Petit Manseng from Mount Juliet Vineyard in Albemarle County. Gravelly clay loam of granitic schist, 400-600’ elevation. Robbie Corpora, grower. Robbie is one of the most progressive growers in Virginia. The understory is not mowed or tilled, and some biodynamic preparations are utilized.

The perpetual reserve wine ages sous voile without sulfur in a 350 L neutral French oak barrel. It makes up 39% for this bottling. Grapes were hand harvested and cooled to cellar temperature overnight. Whole clusters were foot stomped and delicately pressed in a manual basket over twelve hours. Press fractions were combined, settled overnight, and racked together to ferment in one 500 L neutral French oak puncheon and demijohn. Fermentation lasted almost two months. At the tail end of sugar depletion, the active current fermentation is blended with a portion of the reserve wine to finish in the bottle with a target carbonation of roughly four volumes. An equal portion of young wine is withheld from bottling to refill the reserve barrel. Bottles aged on lees for a minimum of 28 months before being riddled and disgorged by hand without dosage. Specific disgorgement date is stamped on the bottle. No SO2 additions were made.

Inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Wall Drawing 118, a prism forms from converging twenty-eight randomized points, one for each month of aging in bottle, into two points representing the base and reserve wines. The prism is meant to invoke a) the overlaid foliation of metamorphic granite found in the vineyard and b) the overlaid vintages of perpetual reserve creating a new collective wine. It’s blasphemous for us hybrid and apple folk to work with vinifera, but it’s actually grown well and is suited to our blasphemous oxidative sparkling program, so here we are.

Patois Cider

Patois is Patrick Collins and Danielle LeCompte. Our focus is balance: How do untended apple trees maintain their ecological equilibrium, and how can an orchard mirror this dynamic? How will several successions of microorganisms collectively transform the fruit? How do we align ourselves and our work with the interconnecting cycles of nature? Can two people do this?

We don’t own land because our scale cannot support those costs. Foraging allows us to utilize existing (if scattered) noncommercial fruit of supreme quality. These trees hold both the historical lessons of past plantings - sites proven by survival - and the genetic renewal through seedlings for future resilience. We observe these trees and attempt to restore them where we have regular access. We may also seek to propagate them through both grafting and sprouting seeds should landowners allow. Sometimes we imagine our own orchard of our favorite found varieties interspersed with vines; sometimes we think no single Shangri-La will ever approach the complexity of so many unique inputs assembled by a century of chance.

We work fairly oxidatively in the cellar, due partly to aesthetic aims and partly to our minimal infrastructure. Everything is done by hand on a one or two person scale. Sparkling wine can be constrained by technique and fixed parameters, but we try to think creatively to achieve our goals with only fruit and time. While the ciders and wines will continue to evolve in the bottle upon release, they are not precious and are meant to be enjoyed.

We hope to demonstrate that conventionally undervalued fruit is capable of producing delicious and complex wines when treated with intention and care.