Troon Winery is based in Applegate Valley, in Southern Oregon. Maybe you’ve heard of them. Maybe you haven’t. We wouldn’t blame you if you hadn’t. For most Oregon wine lovers, Willamette Valley is the gold standard, the shiny coated, pure breed hunting hound, while Southern Oregon is more like the hairless, snaggle toothed, found it on the side of the road stray. Not to say there isn’t quality wine being made down there, but paucity of great producers is palpable. Troon has been around since the 70s, but for us they had always blended into the morass of middling Southern Oregon wineries. You could often find the wines anchoring down the bottom shelves of the Fred Meyer wine department. Real. Exciting. Stuff. But all that changed in 2017.

In 2017 they got purchased by a family with a background in medicine and they made the immediate decision to heal what had been a pretty badly wounded property. Chemical farming had stripped the land barren and the vineyards looked like a depiction of the 1940s Oklahoma dustbowl. The new owners converted to organic, bidoynamic and regernative farming. In fact, they are one of only 4 farms in the world be certified gold standard regnerative. The property had gardens, ponds, animal husbandry, the whole nine yards. If that wasnt enough, they made the decision to graft over the vineyards to a whole slew of interesting grape cultivars. Being that Southern Oregon has no real guiding vision for what it should be (in contrast to the Willamettte Vally, which is defined by Pinot Noir and Chardonnay) it was a smart move to just give everything a whirl. All in all, they now have 20 different varieties planted, most of which are fairly unheard of in Oregon (Negrette, Bourboulanc, Roussanne, Tibouren, Counoise, just to name a few.) 

It’s all incredible exciting, albeit a bit head spinning. As one would imagine, planting your entire vineyard to small parcels of different grapes comes with a host of complications. For the purpose of this story, one of those complications is managing what is now a winery filled with hundreds of vessels of different varieties. And when it comes to bottling all those wines, you’re gonna end up with some odd quantities of things that just don’t fit neatly together. That’s where Post Familiar came into the picture. 

During a visit to Troon over the summer, winemaker Nate Wall let me know about a barrel of orange wine that needed a home. Like so many of our rescued barrels, this one was a byproduct of the tricky logistics of winery life. 

This wine started in the 2021 vintage when they were assembling the blend for their Amber Roussanne (for Troon, an Amber wine is the same as an orange wine.) At the end of blending there was a half barrels worth of wine that just didnt fit into the blend. So they put it aside and said ‘we’ll ignore that little guy and deal with it later.’ (noteworthy detail: half barrels aren’t particularly common in  wineries, so undoubtedly this small barrel stood out over the coming year.)

Come 2022, the same thing happened when they bottled their Amber Vermentino. An extra half barrels worth was left over after blending. They looked around and saw the afformentioned misfit half barrel from 2021 and said, ‘well if we just blend those together into a normal size barrel, then we can REALLY just ignore it for later.’ So thats’ what they did. Because it was a now a mix of two different vintages and two different varieties, they had no plan for how it fit in their lineup. It ended up aging in barrel for another year and half before they asked if we would want to rescue the orphan barrel for a Post Familiar wine.

As the story so often goes, we tasted it and fell in love. By the time we bottled it in October 2024, the wine had been aging in barrel for 2 years post blending. Half of the wine, the 2021 Roussanne, had seen 3 years in barrel! No one does that intentionally in Oregon (ironically, the ONLY other person who had been doing this intentionally in Oregon was Demeus. Makes you wonder….are we like a light for the moths of forsaken extended barrel aged skin contact wines? Or do we just love those wines and so we end up seeking them out? What came first, the Post Familiar egg or the forgotten orange wine chicken? We’ll probably never know.)

All said and done, this orphaned barrel of biodynamically farmed orange wine from our favorite Southern Oregon winery, Troon, produced a meager 23 cases of wine. It tickles us, always, to be able to offer our wine club (you!) something that shouldn’t exist and that will never be recreated again. Savor, share, enjoy, expand your palate.