A wine inspired by the “Mallsoft” genre of music that Joe enjoys: “I turn on the music and start tasting through the cellar and blend.” The wines are vinified separately: Gewurztraminer – 30 days on skins, aged in neutral French oak barrels; Counoise – Direct pressed, aged in neutral French oak barrels; Chardonnay – 30 days of skin contact, aged in French oak barrels. Blended and bottled unfined, unfiltered, with a bit of sulfur. From Joe : Chardonnay adds peachiness, Gewürz adds the tropical notes, and Counoise adds the salty notes.
We love it with: 🍗 🍕 🐟
Type: Skin Contact
Vintage: 2021
Size: 750 mL
Grape: Chardonnay, Gewurtztraminer, Counoise
Region: Willamette Valley, Oregon
Vinification: From Distributor Jenny + Francois : Born and raised in Portland, Oregon, Joe Swick got into the wine business working as a shipping/receiving clerk at a specialty organic food store in his hometown. Tasting different wines and getting to know various Oregonian winemakers was a great start, but Joe wanted to get his hands dirty too, which led him to work his first harvest as a cellar assistant in a local winery in 2003. Following this epiphany, Joe has traveled the globe for a decade during which he made some 15 harvests in places as far as Tasmania, New Zealand, Portugal, Italy, or France, including some time with the legendary Simon Busser in Cahors or Julien Labet in Jura. After these years of intense globetrotting, Swick returned to the Pacific Northwest with loads of new experience and started his eponymous label in the Willamette Valley, knowing he wanted to do things the natural way. Fast forward 10 years, that’s still the case – the Swick philosophy is to make wines as naked and raw as possible while having them be fun and delicious, meaning that there are no conventional additives. But, if the wine benefits from a very small amount of SO2, so be it: “I’m not a fan of having to dump wines down the drain. If it means 10-20 ppm total SO2 added to a wine, I will do it. I prefer wine that tastes like wine, not kombucha,” Joe explains. Other than this security check, Swick’s wines are grapes-only and left to live in freedom: “No yeasts, no acid corrections, no temp control on the fermentor wines… Nothing is controlled. 100% of the stems are used in my red wines, which I work by foot 1-2 times a day.”