2025 Skin Contact Colombard ‘tell your sister i say hi’


2025 Skin Contact Colombard ‘tell your sister i say hi’
Vineyard: Ricetti
AVA: Redwood Valley, CA
Farming: Organic, Dry Farmed
Harvest Date: 19 September 2025
Bottling Date: 8 April 2026
Alc: 12%
Cases: 150
‘tell your sister’ is a skin contact wine with color and tannin that still retains freshness, and to achieve this we separated the Ricetti Colombard into two different skin fermentations. The first portion of Colombard was foot crushed, then soaked on skins for 48 hours before being pressed. The soak pulls a bit of texture from the skins, but the bulk of fermentation time is juice only, so the resulting wine holds acidity and aromatics like a more traditional ‘white’ wine.
The second portion of Colombard was also foot crushed, but it was left on skins for a full week. The fruit fermented to almost dry while on its skins, which pulled much more tannin as well as color and aromatics from the skins and into the liquid. The resulting wine is more traditionally ‘orange’ – tannic, skinsy tasting, and apricot colored.
Both portions were aged separately over the winter, then blended in March before bottling. At blending, the two components were vastly different. The 24 hour skin soaked Colombard was textured, but pale in color and only lightly tropical on the palate. The 10 day skin ferment was sappy, intensely aromatic and dark orange in color. Together, they complement and fill one another out.
Indigenous yeast fermentation. 20 ppm SO2 added at bottling, no other additions, unfined and unfiltered.