Ingredients

You can walk Idiot’s Grace and get a sense for how we farm and make wine just about any day that the tasting room is open, and we answer every question we’re asked. One of the benefits of being a small operation focused on our immediate region is that we have many conversations with the people who eat and drink the fruits of our labor.

In the service of these conversations, we’ve started including ingredients on our back labels. Wine is certainly not a simple thing, but when everything goes just right the fundamental components are few: with grapes, yeast, and bacteria, you’ve got everything you need.  But some wines, and in some years many wines,  need more work in the cellar to avoid ruination.  Remember that we get one chance a year to get it right–there’s no “brewing up a new batch” if something goes sideways.

Ingredient lists are not required for wine (which is why you rarely see them!), but when they are volunteered they must be exhaustive. Our intention is to express the specific character of these grapes on this site— not the Platonic form of a Dolcetto, but instead Dolcetto as it can be only here, truly unique. We see our role in the cellar as that of a shepherd (of an enormous flock of invisible microbial actors, with needs and personalities).  We are not manufacturers, or cooks (there are no recipes). We take every gesture and addition seriously. For each ingredient you see on one of our bottles, there is an entry below that explains what it does, why it’s there, and how we think about it.

: : Grapes : :  Fruit which we grow, is picked by hand, and is delivered to the cellar on the day of harvest.  Everything from the farm in Mosier is certified organic.  In a few instances, we get fruit from properties we don’t own (e.g. our Semillon) and though it may not be organic, we are attendant to the growing process.  Once in a while, we purchase a quantity of fruit from the area (e.g. Leon Millot, Petit sirah, Merlot) to see if we like it enough to plant some ourselves.

: : Indigenous Yeast and Malolactic Bacteria : :   The act of fermentation happens by the work of our microbial flock, ever-shifting populations present on every plant in the field and every surface in the cellar.  We depend on the site-specificity of these organisms, and not just because they are responsible for the alcoholic and malolactic fermentations that beget wine from juice; the (unknowable, in real time) identity and population dynamics of these critters exert major influence on the scent and flavor of our wines.  We could purchase selected strains and add them from a pouch, and we’d sleep better for it, but the brazen act of letting the process happen as it will is a major driver of the singular character of what we produce here.

: : SO2 (“sulfites”) : : This simple form of sulfur has been a remarkable and nearly ubiquitous tool in winemaking worldwide for centuries.  It discourages yeast and bacteria, and, used at bottling, offers some protection against the destructive effects of oxygen in air as wine ages.

: : Yeast Nutrients : : Organic grapes should be a nourishing foodstuff for the yeast and bacteria long adapted to the winemaking process.  But grown modestly, and especially without abundant nitrogen fertilization, the juice of these grapes may not have sufficient nutrition to simultaneously satisfy every microbe in the ferment.  If the bacteria get ahead of the yeast, the necessary creation of alcohol is obstructed and the wine remains sweet, and it may ultimately spoil.  Depending on a number of factors (the soil, vine age, whether the ground is cultivated or irrigated, etc.) we may elect to add an organic nutrient composed of dried, pulverized yeast (described as “inactivated yeast,” on our back label).  If the nitrogen shortage is severe, as is common in dry-farmed and hillside viticulture, we hit a reasonable limit on the yeast product; in this case, a measure of the salt diammonium phosphate (a common nitrogen source in baking and other fermentation situations) may be added.

: : Water : : In the arid, interior west, where the sunshine can be excessive and our tendency or ability to provide sufficient irrigation water sometimes lags behind what the plants need, late-season heat can dehydrate grapes as they hang.  While I advocate for raisins in oatmeal cookies, they are not something we love to see in the cellar.  If it looks like the concentrated sugar they’d bring would lead to excessive alcohol content or unhappily sweet finished wine, we will add enough water to bring us back to the edge of reasonableness.  (You’ll commonly see this in Primitivo, for example.)  High sugar years will still result in evidently alcoholic wines, though it’s not what we wish for.

: : Tartaric Acid : : Ripening grapes become more sweet and less sour.  It is our preference to harvest with just enough sugar; at this point, there is usually a nice fresh acidity which makes both the fruit and the resultant wine taste bright and energetic.  Weirdly: some vine varieties, on certain rootstocks (and maybe more so in certain soils), will give away a portion of the desired acidity (in exchange for potassium, as it happens) with the result that the pH of the wine gets unhealthily high.  Cabernet franc is our usual challenge here.  The answer–to sidestep many other possible interventions down the road–is to add back just enough of the acid lost.  Hence, tartaric acid–produced from other grapes.