After the reclamation project that resulted in our 2022 Skin contact Riesling, Alex Althuser reached out again to let us know that he had stumbled upon the last remnants of wine from his Demeus project. As a refresher, Alex had decided to discontinue his winery after a catastrophic injury during the 2022 harvest prompted the decision to change career paths. Despite being one of the most promising voices for skin contact wines in America, life had other plans for him. We helped him rescue over 100 cases of wine in spring from being distilled, and honestly, we thought that wine was about as good as orange wine gets for $28 a bottle. It was also the best selling wine we’ve ever released. At the time, we talked about that wine as the swan song of the Demeus project. But we were wrong. 

It turned out there were two more steel drums of skin contact riesling that had been lost in the shuffle of winding down the winery. We met with Alex to taste the barrels and we absolutely loved them. They were totally different from the wine we had salvaged last year. Yes, they were both skin contact rieslings, but unlike our spring release, which was macerated on skins for 120 days, these wines only saw 10 days. The result of that shorter maceration was a more playful, chuggable expression of skin contact riesling. The barrels were from two different vintages, 2020 and 2021, but because they had been contained in stainless steel drums, they had been preserved perfectly. We knew we wanted the wine. It represented a classic Post Familiar opportunity to bottle some delicious wine that otherwise wouldn’t exist while also helping a small local winemaker with a problematic situation. 

Since we had just released our skin contact riesling in Spring, we made the decision to get extra creative with these two barrels. In an attempt to not release two similar wines back to back, we thought, what if we turned it into sparkling wine? Sparkling orange wine is something you never really see and this wine had the freshness of fruit and spice that would be perfect for bubbles.

We told Alex we’d take the barrels and we thought that would be the end of the story. But, as it always goes, things happen.

A couple weeks later, we were spending time at the winery with our pal and frequent collaborator Isabel Newlin from Dacha (Wild Pinot & Costal Rose) tasting through her young wines in barrel. They were fantastic, as always. Towards the end of the tasting, she poured us tastes from two barrels of Chardonnay that she was having misgivings about. The wine was delicious, she said, but it just didn’t taste like the vineyard from which it came. Isabel is a true vigneron, which is a French term for someone who farms their own grapes and does all their own winemaking. Most American winemakers don’t farm their own grapes, hence you see the term ‘winemaker’ used more often in America than ‘vigneron.’ As such, if she doesn't think a wine properly expresses the vineyard from which it came, she doesn't want to bottle it as a site specific wine. These barrels, despite the quality, weren’t gonna work for her. They didnt’ taste exactly like she wanted the vineyard to taste, thus she didn’t know what to do with them. She asked if we’d help her find a creative outlet for them. It took all of about 2 seconds for us to ask her if she’d be open to blending it with a wine from another winery. We’d been fantasizing about doing a multi winery blend since day 1, and this seemed like the perfect situation to do it. We could blend Alex’s skin contact Riesling with Isabel's Chardonnay, and then turn the whole thing into sparkling wine! Seemed just weird enough to work.

Well, it did work. It worked very well….despite the complications of hauling wine all across the damn state (the steel drums of Riesling went from a winery in Portland to a winery in Corvallis where we blended them with the Chardonnay. And then we brought the blended tanks to Mcminville to get made into sparkling. And then brought the 110 cases of finished sparkling bottles all the way back to our warehouse in Portland. Oof.)  All said and done, we’re super excited to release our first true sparkling wine, just in time for the holidays. It’s our first and hopefully not last, multi winery collaboration.