Unlike our Mystery Red, this Carbonic Gamay was a wine of pure intention. We’ve been wanting to make a carbonic maceration Gamay Noir in the style of the late, great natural wine icon Marcel Lapierre, and in 2024, the opportunity finally came.
Our dear friend (and canned rosé seltzer co-creator) Luke Wylde had decided to sit the 2024 vintage out. His project, Lares, was flush with wine and he needed a break. The one fruit source he was reluctant to let go of, though, was his Gamay Noir from Jubilee Vineyard. Gamay Noir is in high demand in the Willamette, and if you have a contract for good fruit, you don’t let it slip away — because once you do, you’re probably not getting it back. Luke wasn’t sure what his winemaking future looked like, but he wanted to hold onto that prized fruit. He asked if we wanted the grapes for a Post Familiar wine. For us, it was the perfect chance to finally try something we’d been talking about for years: a Gamay in the spirit of Marcel Lapierre.
Lapierre and the other Beaujolais pioneers helped put carbonic maceration on the map — a way of making wine that turns everything inside out. Instead of crushing fruit and letting yeast get to work in the usual way, you keep the clusters whole in a sealed tank. Inside that closed space, the berries start fermenting from the inside out. Each grape is like a tiny little fermentation chamber. Eventually the skins burst, releasing juice into the bottom of the tank.
Here’s where styles diverge. In Oregon, the usual approach is to let that juice collect at the bottom of the tank and ferment like a normal red wine. As it heats up, it softens the rest of the grapes, and the tank slowly turns into a traditional vat of fermenting juice — grape soup, basically. This is called semi-carbonic maceration: it begins carbonic, but finishes in the classic way.
What we wanted to explore was the Lapierre style. Instead of letting that juice sit and take over, we drained it off every day. That kept the berries intact and extended the “from the inside out” fermentation. It’s closer to a true full carbonic maceration, and it’s rarely done here.
The result? Wines that are intensely aromatic, juicy, and bright — often tasting like fresh fruit, flowers, and spice, with soft tannins. People sometimes call carbonic wines crunchy, gluggable, electric — alive in a way that traditional reds rarely are.
Carbonic wines have become really popular in the natural wine world, and you see them made just about everywhere. Most producers bottle theirs in the spring after harvest, hoping to capture that fleeting, juicy energy of springtime. Those wines can be delightful, but they don’t usually carry the depth that comes with more time in barrel. For this wine, we wanted the best of both worlds — the playful brightness of carbonic fruit, but balanced with nearly a year of barrel aging to give it length and gravity. It’s like a chamber choir covering a pop song — playful roots, but with extra weight and harmony.
All in all, we couldn’t be happier with the results. This bottling exists because of the chance to hold onto a vineyard connection, but also because of a long-standing desire to show what Gamay can do here in Oregon when given the same patience and attention it receives in Beaujolais. Our experiments often lean toward the fun and surprising; this time we leaned into a more serious wine. We think you’re going to love it.
