Pied de Cuve Orange 2023, Little Farm Winery

Description from the Producer

Tasting Notes: A bold, intense yet fresh skin contact white made from Riesling. The nose shows typically powerful orange zest, tea leaf and ripe stone fruit notes. The palate is dry, quite full bodied and very textural combining spice, zest, minerality and orange zest phenolic grip. A great food pairing wine with middle-eastern spices and umami.

Pied de Cuve are Little Farm's natural wines. these are wines that receive almost no intervention from start to finish and are therefore a pure reflection of the place, the grape and the vintage. Pied de Cuve is a technique to start a fermentation using only the yeasts that are naturally occurring on the skin of the grapes.

Vintage & Production: 2023 was a tough year in British Columbia. The winter of 2022-23 saw very cold temperatures that damaged many of the primary buds and killed vines in many vineyards. At Little Farm we didn't fair to badly. Initially, our crop was only down about 30% from the cold weather. But then the starlings struck. With little food in the valley from the cold devastation to vineyards and orchards, the birds went in a frenzy, and despite netting the grapes and deploying flicker tape to scare them off, they rampaged through the vines eating about half of what we had. So in the end, we ended up with about 1/3 of a normal vintage. At least the quality is good, but the quantity is small.

The organic Riesling grapes for this wine were foot trodden and left to ferment naturally on the skins for around 14 days before gentle pressing and then finishing their fermentation and spending another 8 months ageing on the lees in stainless steel before settling then bottling unfined and unfiltered in August 2024.