2018 Joseph Swan Cities Corner Grenache Blanc (Orange Wine)

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$32.00
Brand: Joseph Swan

I made my first orange wine way back in 1980. I was frustrated by a couple of UCD Enology professors, when asked why white wines were made with only minimal skin contact rather than fermentation on the skins like red wines, said that they would be bad with no real explanation as to why. I knew that historically wines were made from grapes with little regard to the color in the skins. Things like refrigeration and fashion came much later. Since I couldn't get any satisfactory answer, I decided to find out myself why it supposedly couldn't be done successfully. The first one was made from chardonnay grapes from Winery Lake Vineyard in Carneros, which happened to be the most expensive grapes in the state at the time. I called the wine Gonzo as a friend who was in the wine business at the time and who happened to be a major fan of Hunter S. Thompson, the king of Gonzo journalism, tasted it and said the wine was a wine version of Thompson's writing. I managed to prove 2 things to a bunch of people. First, that you could make successful wines this way and, I was either a mad genius or more probably simply mad!

 

I repeated the experiment two more times before deciding to move on to other things. However, my appreciation for wines made in this way always lingered but I thought that chardonnay might not be the best choice of grapes. I made one orange wine from pinot gris grown in Saralee's Vineyard before the new owners grafted it over. A couple of years later we split the harvest if grenache blanc from Catie's Corner. Half went into the press to become traditional white wine (Cuvée Normal?) and the rest into a fermenter and treated like pinot noir. Both wines turned out to be exceptional. Grapes separated at birth, sharing some of the same characteristics but both obviously really different as well. Nature or nurture? Maybe both.