And now...The Envelope, please...
This wine is electric! The color, the aromas, the flavors, the textures all pulse with vitality. Our 2016 Envelope is exotic, enticing, exciting and is all about paradox. A white wine with color... made like a red...a white with tannin and structure...a full-bodied, broad wine with moderate alcohol and a cleansing, juicy quality with full malo-lactic fermentation! This is fantastic stuff! Our 2016 Envelope is an intriguingly aromatic and an intoxicatingly delicious skin-fermented "orange" wine. The flavors and aromas are reflective of dried apricots, peaches, honey, roses, lychees, brown spice, brown sugar, apple compote, minerals, butterscotch and dried papaya. This is nuts, yes there are those flavors too in this complex, inviting wine. Made from 52% Chardonnay, 30% Gewürztraminer, 14% Malvasia Bianca and 4% Albariño this is a dry, full-bodied white that has a gorgeous psychedelic orange appearance. This is a balanced, long wine that would be delicious with corn, squash, smoked ham, duck and figs, quince paste and cheese, seeds, root vegetables, caramelized flavors and most things porcine. Not to mention a good Cioppino or Bouillabaisse or Chowder! All the fruit was hand-harvested and was gently de-stemmed, crushed by foot and fermented on its skins. The wine was all co-fermented (all with wild/ambient yeast) for 16-25 days on its skin after which the wine was bucketed out and pressed off, then put in 23% new and the remaining 77% in old/neutral oak puncheons, barrels and hogsheads where the wine spent 22 months before it was bottled. Only 188 cases of this gem were produced!
