Teutonic "Candied Mushroom" Riesling, Willamette Valley, Oregon 2024

FROM TEUTONIC WINE CO.:

THE WINE: Much like any cult favorite, this wine lives in unlimited spaces of imagination. Not easily classified or described. The Riesling used to make this wine comes from one of our oldest and dearest vineyard collaborators, Crow Valley. These little guys see extended contact with both the skins and a little botrytis, also known as noble rot. The resulting wine is an incredible balance of all of the basic food tastes: Sweet, salty, sour and umami. One of the most fun wines to pair with other umami rich foods and get ready for greatness...

THE PRODUCER: Today, we make between four and six thousand cases a year. The varieties include Riesling (of course), Pinot Noir, Pinot Meunier, Pinot Gris, Pinot Blanc, Gewürztraminer and recently we added Viognier and Grüner Veltliner to the line up. Barnaby also likes to create blends and experiment with fermenting in amphorae, whole cluster versus de-stemmed fermentation, extended skin contact and adding flor yeast from one barrel to another. While we still make wine from the vineyard in Alsea, we also source fruit from other vineyards around the Willamette Valley. It’s important to us that we only work with vineyards that are dry-farmed (no irrigation) and ideally have older vines (20 years or older), are planted in a higher elevation making them cooler than other sites, allowing the fruit to hang longer on the vines without over-ripening with the sugar levels, but allowing them to develop physiologically for more complex flavors. In the winery, we only use wild yeast we source from each vineyard site, creating a pied de cuve (a traditional French technique for making a yeast starter) and use only the yeast from the vineyards to ferment the wines. Our fermentation vessels include neutral oak barrels, clay amphorae and traditional fermentation bins for the reds (primary fermentation only) and then they go into barrel. We made this easy to remember by adding on our back label “Old & Cold, High & Dry, Wood & Wild.”