In 2021 we teamed up with Scott to create our Hybrid Red. It was one our favorite collaborations and we wanted to work with him again in 2022 to continue exploring hybrids. Unfortunately, the Willamette Valley was hit with a devastating frost in early Spring of that year and the Leon Millot was basically a lost cause. We told Scott to keep us on his radar and hopefully we could find a project in the future.

Fast forward a year and Scott tells us he heard the story of our Hazy Chardonnay. He let us know that he also had a collection of stray barrels that were all delicious, if not a little peculiar. He had no home for them and thought there was an opportunity for us to come into his cellar and spend an afternoon trying to blend the barrels together in order to create something unique. Sounded like fun to us.

After tasting through the cellar, we were totally smitten by a barrel of chardonnay that had been in his cellar for almost 2 years and had become pretty oxidative. Wine that has been exposed to heavy amounts of oxygen over a long period of time starts to shed it’s fruit and moves into the savory spectrum of toasted hazelnuts, maple syrup, roast pumpkin and preserved lemon. While the flavor profiles can be layered and exhilarating, the one problem with oxidative wines is that they tend to lose their freshness. They can often feel heavy and sappy on the palate. In the case of such a barrel, the typical move for a winemaker would be to blend the oxidative barrel into a much larger lot of younger wine, thus hiding the distinctive characteristics of said barrel. Basically, the easy move is to blend away it’s singularity. Scott, on the other hand, recognized that this barrel had something worthwhile to preserve, he just hadn’t formulated a plan for it yet.

Right away the plan seemed obvious to us. What if we flipped the typical script around and instead of trying to hide the special barrel in an ocean of young wine, we highlighted it’s autumnal complexity and blended in just enough young wine to give a burst of freshness.

Oxidation conjures such unique impressions and we wanted those to be the centerpiece of the drinking experience. The perfect candidate for blending would be a nervy young white wine that has a fairly neutral flavor, but still has the brightness and vitality of youth.  Luckily for us, Scott was flush with a minerally, lemon fresh white made from a grape called Melon de Bourgogne. It’s a grape that he’s been a big champion of here in Oregon and he’s perhaps the master interpreter of it on the West Coast. With it’s sharp acidity, we hoped that the addition of it to the mix could create a wine that mimics the high acid, but intentionally oxidized, whites of the Jura, France. 

After an afternoon of trials, we ended up with the perfect proportions for a wine that drinks with tons of energy and still captures the spectrum of savory wildness that only oxygen and time can produce. Does it taste like the Jura? Kinda. Does it taste like Oregon? Not any Oregon wines we know. Does it taste like a Post Familiar wine that is meant to push the boundaries of experimentation and reintroduce neglected flavor profiles to wine drinkers? Absolutely.