2024 sparkling rosé with thai basil

This wine is both an honor and homage to so many things.

Farm Club, and their crew, has been such an anchor and inspiration for my life up here. As I was planning my first commercial vintage, they said they wanted me to make a wine for them—which just blew me away and sent me dreaming of the possibilities.

I’ve had the opportunity to work collaboratively with other folks on beverages from my past life in beer. But the ones that always stuck with me were the ones that felt like an authentic molding of minds and places.

I was interested in making a wine from grapes super close to their farm/brewery/restaurant and finding a way of superimposing an ingredient from their farm to give it some form of a signet stamp of their place.

When I worked alongside Averie from Keeping TOgether I saw her have the brilliant idea of using an infused simple syrup as the carbonation source for a beer, instead of separately infusing an ingredient.

So this weird little wine was born. Pinot Noir from Shady. Fermented with native yeast. Bottle conditioned with a Thai Basil simple syrup from plants grown at Loma/Farm Club. I bottle conditioned it similar to the way I used to do for Cove Beers. Less carbonation than “champagne” and a nice little bit of haze from the yeast addition at the end. It feels like I pulled a thread from every corner of my life and brought them all into a beverage.

In straight truthfulness. I did so many trials and calculations to try to get the simple syrup dose spot on. Somehow the Thai Basil flavor came through more subtly than I had hoped. It’s an absolutely lovely wine, and I’m so pleased with it, but I spent a lot of time beating myself up about my failure to hit my imagined target. It made me miss my father a lot. Whenever I’d see him do something that made him feel frustrated with himself, he’d often try to snap out of it by chuckling the phrase “Welp, guess no one is perfect… anymore”.

So, to Pops. And the future. And continuing to find a weird little hybrid of wild beer and wine.

Process:

Shady Lane Cellars Pinot Noir was picked on Sept 19 2024, then pressed whole cluster on my little basket press. The juice settled for a couple of days then was racked to kegs and a stainless steel barrel to ferment. I pitched a blend of non-saccharomyces yeasts as a bio-protectant so that native yeasts could do the bulk of fermentation.

The yeast did their job in pretty quick fashion, and the wine hit terminal gravity. Post fermentation I left the wine on its lees and did lots of stirring to try to help build more body and richness into it. Probably “risked it for the biscuit” too much, by not sulfuring immediately after fermentation ended, so the wine went through native ML (surprise!!).

I was really happy with the rich, round character of the wine, but the acid had fallen off a bit after going through malolactic. So I added 1g/L of tartaric acid to get the pH back to where it felt a bit more snappy.

To be honest, I’m still trying to figure out where my lines/boundaries are as a maker. Ideally, I’ll never add anything but a little sulfur and bio-protectant, but at the very least I’ll always be transparent about the process.

In the late spring I did a small filtration on the wine and then bottled it up with an itty bitty yeast pitch and a simple syrup infused with Thai Basil from Loma/Farm Club.

Tasting Notes:

strawberry cucumber water
wet rock
herb garden breeze finish

chill bubbles with a lil bit of haze

30 cases produced. Available exclusively at Farm Club in Traverse City