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Twenty-two miles from Mount Hood’s snowy peak, in an alpine river valley teeming with birds and oscillating light, lives a wild farm. Cows, chickens, and pigs graze among vines, and fungi and flowers proliferate as gardens merge with forest. Our wines are exciting for their wild exuberance when they are young, but they will only reveal their full potential to unite disparate time, place, and experience when stored properly for many years — a minimum of five years, but ideally 8 – 15 years following vintage — in a dark place between 53 – 60 degrees Fahrenheit and at 80 – 85% humidity.
Tzum wines come from small, specific fields, situated between the rainforest and the desert, throughout the Gorge. These parcels embody diverse terrains, vantage points, and climates. Whether single variety or field blend, each planting captures the essence and identity of its environment.
Winemaker’s note: “Sean Nos means “in the old way” and the name can be used to refer to various ancient or traditional activities. The cuttings for this field blend come from a 100+-year-old interplanted vineyard in Tenerife. We grafted them over the Syrah in Lunasa in 2020. The wine can be created as a white, pink or red wine each year.”
Vineyard: On a sandy plateau protected from the wind by columnar basalt mounds. (the ex-Lunasa vineyard)
Grapes: Canary Islands-inspired field blend of Pink Negramoll, Listan Negro, Malvasia Fina, Mission, Palomino &
Babosa Negro.
Making of: the grapes are hand-picked and naturally co-fermented. The 2021 vintage spent 11 days on the skins before being pressed to barrel and bottled in spring 2022. The 2022 vintage was fermented in a 20hl wood vat for 12 days before being pressed to old puncheons. Both are unfined, unfiltered.
2022: “It is equal parts red, white and pink grapes. By mixing grapes of many colors it allows us to arrive at a translucent strawberry pink by a winemaking pathway that would be impossible with a grape of a single color. We’re able to ferment the wine to dryness on the skins while retaining a very pale color and all the aromatic delicacy this entails. In one sense this is an expansion of the wine's color and textural palette, but more powerfully it allows us to experience the wine as different colors in different moments. It is a step further than “orange wine” in this sense. In one moment it can feel like an exotic and intoxicatingly floral white and just seconds later it will have transitioned into a more bloody and sanguine mode, this feeling might last for an instant before the sensation shifts again as if each grape was taking a turn revealing a different aspect of the site.”