If you haven’t tried orange wine from Vermont, I highly recommend it! Our 2018 IAPETUS Tectonic is one of my favorite wines for so many reasons. Tectonic is a skin-contact wine – what’s often also called an orange wine. This kind of wine is made with white grapes, but they’re treated like a red grape in terms of the winemaking. After pressing, you leave the skins & seeds in contact with the juice – sometimes just for a few days, sometimes for much longer. Skin contact wines are actually a very old method of winemaking that originated in the country of Georgia, and it’s a style I love. I’ve had a lot of them, and Tectonic is on par with the best.

This wine is made from a single grape variety called La Crescent. It’s a white grape variety, so you can make a white wine from it, but it has beautiful, glowing, amber-flecked skins. When they get perfectly ripe and you leave those skins and seeds in contact with the juice for an extended time, you get all kinds of color and aroma and flavors from the compounds they contain.

The La Crescent in this vintage is from our Mount Philo vineyard, just south of our winery in Charlotte, and from our friends Kendra and Rob at Ellison Estate in Grand Isle, which is up in the Lake Champlain islands. The soils at the Mount Philo vineyard are deep, well drained, sandy/stony loams formed in both glacial till derived from limestone, calcareous shale, schist, and quartzite; the Ellison Estate site is a planting on an island in Lake Champlain, with shallow bedrock and shale soils.

WINEMAKING

2018 was great for ripening, with nice warm temperatures around harvest time, so there were lots of great phenolics in those La Crescent grapes. Our head winegrower Ethan and his team chose to macerate this wine on its skins for 84 days. This is the first vintage of Tectonic where we chose not to add a malolactic culture, resulting in only a partial completion of malolactic fermentation (the process whereby bacteria naturally convert tart malolactic acid to softer lactic acid). After it was pressed, about eighty percent was sent to neutral oak to age sur lie. “Sur lie” means that the fermented juice was left in contact with the “lees”, which is a winemaking term for spent yeast cells. The rest of the wine was aged in stainless steel tanks. After seven months, they were blended together and eventually bottled.

OK COOL, SO WHAT DOES IT TASTE LIKE?!

There’s a lot going on in Tectonic. First of all, it’s really aromatic. Intense apricot notes jump right out of the glass…like apricot jam on homebaked bread, with a bit of melted butter. There’s some warm butterscotch. La Crescent typically has aromas of white flowers, and those come through. I also get a little lime, or lime leaf, and definitely oranges (although no oranges were harmed in the making of this wine!). You can serve La Crescent with a little chill, and the dynamics of the aromas and flavors will really evolve as it warms in the glass.

On the palate, there’s apricot and orange pith, and young peach. Not a super-ripe peach, but one that’s still a bit crunchy and not too sweet. Tectonic is definitely tart and has high acidity, so this is a wine that we love introducing to sour beer fans in the Tasting Room at the winery! If they haven’t had a wine they liked before, Tectonic will often convert them.

WHAT TO PAIR WITH YOUR ORANGE WINE

Orange wine is extremely versatile, and honestly pairs with things that are usually a challenge with wine in general. I absolutely love Tectonic with strong Vermont cheeses like Jasper Hill’s Bayley Hazen Blue or Consider Bardwell’s Dorset. It’s perfect with a big handful of salted Marcona almonds, which you can (and should) pick up from the good people at Dedalus in Burlington, Vermont. When we did a pairing dinner with Dedalus, Chef Justin matched Tectonic with seared duck breast over braised fennel with orange segments and it was *bomb*. Orange wine can also stand up to spicy curries, like a Madras curry, or pasta with garlic and green olives! Garlic can be tough to pair with wine, so if you love garlic you’ll want to check out that pairing. You get an amplification of the briny notes in the wine when you have it with meaty green olives like Castelvetranos, which is awesome.

Bayley Hazen Blue - photo courtesy of Jasper Hills Farm

Last but very much not least: Tectonic, like all of our Iapetus wines, is spontaneously fermented, unfiltered, and unfined. I think it’s a wonderful expression of our Vermont terroir and a lot of fun to drink. I hope you get to try it! You can pick it up from our online shop -- while the vintage lasts. We ship to 16 states, or if you’re local you can currently pick it up curbside at the winery three days a week (until we’re able to re-open the Tasting Room). Here’s to trying new wines and expanding our palates!

Cheers,

Kate Cartwright

Tasting Room and Wine Club Manager

TECTONIC SHIFTS: ORANGE WINE FROM VERMONT IS A THING