Midnight’s Farm Quince 2023
In former vintages, this fruit always became a sparkling wine. You’ll notice on the bottles, we have in fact simply crossed that word out, having printed the labels some time ago. Here’s why: we made this wine three years in a row, and it was always our favorite. Never much to go around, but so special: Quince from very old trees growing on Lopez, that heady alluring aroma throwing its personality around the winery, demanding a pedestal of its own. But in 2023, the wine seemed incomplete. For the first time, it wasn’t calling us to bottle it. We waited months. And then we waited years.
We kept thinking we should tinker, we should change it - that we would add more Quince, that something would shift and we would see what was needed. Finally, this past April, something did shift. Nic poured me a glass of the wine from tank - we smelled, we sipped, we looked at each other. It was done! Just like that. It took an extra 18 months longer than we thought, but now here it was, shining a new and different face, one without bubbles! Meaning, this was our first fruit (non grape) wine, that we would make without allowing the natural sugars of the fruit to self carbonate and create a sparkling wine. The wine was done. It was still, and mellow, layered and complete. We had only needed patience.
You’ll find this to be both a radically different wine than we have made in the past, as well as totally in line with who we are as winemakers: it’s fresh, tangy, delightful and strange. A low ABV wine that is around 5% alcohol, you can drink it in the afternoon, you can drink it with pork chops, you can drink it with tiny leaves of arugula covered in fresh goat cheese. It tastes of Quince: perfumed and tangy, exotic and familiar, but it can be treated like a white wine, blending seemlessly into pizza or pasta, galettes and salads (we have tried all this combinations! We swear!)
In former vintages, this fruit always became a sparkling wine. You’ll notice on the bottles, we have in fact simply crossed that word out, having printed the labels some time ago. Here’s why: we made this wine three years in a row, and it was always our favorite. Never much to go around, but so special: Quince from very old trees growing on Lopez, that heady alluring aroma throwing its personality around the winery, demanding a pedestal of its own. But in 2023, the wine seemed incomplete. For the first time, it wasn’t calling us to bottle it. We waited months. And then we waited years.
We kept thinking we should tinker, we should change it - that we would add more Quince, that something would shift and we would see what was needed. Finally, this past April, something did shift. Nic poured me a glass of the wine from tank - we smelled, we sipped, we looked at each other. It was done! Just like that. It took an extra 18 months longer than we thought, but now here it was, shining a new and different face, one without bubbles! Meaning, this was our first fruit (non grape) wine, that we would make without allowing the natural sugars of the fruit to self carbonate and create a sparkling wine. The wine was done. It was still, and mellow, layered and complete. We had only needed patience.
You’ll find this to be both a radically different wine than we have made in the past, as well as totally in line with who we are as winemakers: it’s fresh, tangy, delightful and strange. A low ABV wine that is around 5% alcohol, you can drink it in the afternoon, you can drink it with pork chops, you can drink it with tiny leaves of arugula covered in fresh goat cheese. It tastes of Quince: perfumed and tangy, exotic and familiar, but it can be treated like a white wine, blending seemlessly into pizza or pasta, galettes and salads (we have tried all this combinations! We swear!)
In former vintages, this fruit always became a sparkling wine. You’ll notice on the bottles, we have in fact simply crossed that word out, having printed the labels some time ago. Here’s why: we made this wine three years in a row, and it was always our favorite. Never much to go around, but so special: Quince from very old trees growing on Lopez, that heady alluring aroma throwing its personality around the winery, demanding a pedestal of its own. But in 2023, the wine seemed incomplete. For the first time, it wasn’t calling us to bottle it. We waited months. And then we waited years.
We kept thinking we should tinker, we should change it - that we would add more Quince, that something would shift and we would see what was needed. Finally, this past April, something did shift. Nic poured me a glass of the wine from tank - we smelled, we sipped, we looked at each other. It was done! Just like that. It took an extra 18 months longer than we thought, but now here it was, shining a new and different face, one without bubbles! Meaning, this was our first fruit (non grape) wine, that we would make without allowing the natural sugars of the fruit to self carbonate and create a sparkling wine. The wine was done. It was still, and mellow, layered and complete. We had only needed patience.
You’ll find this to be both a radically different wine than we have made in the past, as well as totally in line with who we are as winemakers: it’s fresh, tangy, delightful and strange. A low ABV wine that is around 5% alcohol, you can drink it in the afternoon, you can drink it with pork chops, you can drink it with tiny leaves of arugula covered in fresh goat cheese. It tastes of Quince: perfumed and tangy, exotic and familiar, but it can be treated like a white wine, blending seemlessly into pizza or pasta, galettes and salads (we have tried all this combinations! We swear!)