Nightshine

“Forbearance is the first care we give to what we do not know.”
- Wendell Berry, A Small Porch

The word “grapevine” is a metaphor. The thing we call a vine is an entire ecosystem made of hundreds, thousands, even millions of lives, most of which we don’t notice.

I realized recently that I’ve never seen a tree, at least not the idea of an individual tree, in the real world. It took some really obvious examples in a forest on the Oregon coast to make me see this… or really to make me aware of something I’d always seen.

“Tree”

In the oak savannah on the hillsides around the vineyard where I’m working, the oaks are a collection of lives. Lichens and mosses and misteltoes and galls and mushrooms and more all grow on and with and are inseparable from the trees.

“Tree”

These are just the things we see, the things that are attached. There are detachable parts of the tree too. Birds, animals, insects…they may be able to walk or fly away from the tree, but not really. They could move from tree to tree, but they can’t leave all trees or they would die.

And as much as we want our grapevines to be clear of fungi and other lives, the truth is we can only keep those other lives at bay… “in balance” for our goals of harvesting grapes. Go look closely at an old vineyard. Every vine is covered from head to toe with lives. But also the soil teems with invisible lives which fuse with and become inseparable from the vine.

One of those interdepending lives in the vine ecosystem is my own. Maybe yours too?

The quote from Wendell Berry reminds us that to act with love in a world where we know so little may mean, initially, to refrain from acting. First, do no harm. We protect the myriad interconnected lives of which we may be ignorant by using restraint, patient self-control.

I’m not gifted with patience in most things. (Wendy is probably laughing at that understatement.) Winegrowing and making are great teachers of patience, however, and I wonder at times if I’ve been drawn into this field as a kind of purgatory from which I can’t leave until I work through my failings (ie for the rest of my life).

The solar eclipse filtered through Nightshine

NIGHTSHINE 2022

… is the carrot dangled by patience. We bottled this wine in October to go out in the fall wine club release. It was a plush, juicy, pleasure-ride of a wine going into bottle. A week later it tasted, to me, like orange juice.

Bottle shock is real. I had to strongly urge everyone in the wine club not to drink this wine for a while.

If you like waiting as much as I do, you probably ignored those urgings. But if you held out, or just forgot about that wine… I have good news:

The wait is over!

Nighshine has just come out of bottle shock and is becoming, once again, the delicious thing it promised to be.

Drink away!

Nightshine is essentially a zero-zero wine. But it’s better than that, so let me explain:

The grapes for this wine come from a vineyard that was planted over a hundred years ago. The vineyard has been stewarded for generations by the Galleano family, and is certified organic. The vines are not irrigated (that’s a pretty big zero in our climate), nor were they sprayed in 2022 (another huge zero).

Wendy stomped these grapes – following a foot-washing ceremony, of course – and they soaked for a day before pressing to barrel. In this sense they fermented off skins, like a rosé. But it looks like a red. So it’s not a rosé, but it isn’t a red either.

I actually got the TTB to approve the label to say “Red Wine (approx).” If you are unfamiliar with the TTB label approval process, let me just say that this was one of my greatest achievements in my entire winemaking career.

If you care about sulfites: I added about 10 ppm of sulfites midway through the aging process, due to a bit of excessive oxidation. That’s why you’ll see sulfites on the label. Other than this, nothing was added, and the wine was bottled unfiltered and unfined. If you tested for sulfites you would find zero, because that 10ppm was immediately bound up and it has been a year since they were added to the wine. They are long gone, but we believe in transparency.

The wine is still evolving, of course. Getting better every day. It’s out of bottle shock, and who knows how good it will get.

Last night it tasted like a dark chocolate filled with cherry liqueur. If you are someone who likes to engage in the frivolity of Valentine’s Day, it would be a perfect pairing with a box of chocolates and an over-priced meal. It also tastes great chilled, and keeps well for multiple days in the fridge.

The point is, patience has been rewarded… and the reward may be sweet enough to remind me to be more patient in the future.

GET SOME NIGHTSHINE NOW

Cheers!
Adam