2020 Left Foot Charley Tale Feathers Vineyard Skin-Fermented Pinot Gris Old Mission Peninsula

Winemaker Notes:   The skins absolutely dominate the aromas and palate. The wine has tea-like qualities with a striking earthy spice. This is not your traditional white wine. Think of it more like a light red. We like to serve this wine at cellar temp in the winter, and lightly chilled in the summer

For this wine, we fermented the juice with the skins as we would a red wine fermentation, but instead of pressing after a week or two, we let the wine age with the skins for four months in stainless steel. We then moved the wine to neutral oak puncheons for seven months. The skins of Gris are a raspberry color which is typically not very stable, but when it has such a long time to bind with the tannins, it creates a peculiar hue. The oxygen that inevitably creeps in further tints the wine and we end up with a beautiful orange colored wine.