Fall Release 2021
After an early harvest, all the 2021 wines are resting in barrels. It’s time to turn attention to the recently bottled 2020 vintage. In 2020 Marginalia made three wines, all from vineyards on the eastern fringe of the Walla Walla AVA. These wines are available now for purchase in the web store under the Current Releases tab above.
2020 Light Red Wine — $26 ($22.10 Subscriber, $19.50 Patron)
21.6% Pinot Noir, 78.4% Pinot Gris all from Breezy Slope Vineyard
Walla Walla AVA, 12.9% ABV
This wine, a cofermented blend of Pinot Noir and Pinot Gris, has become a signature wine for Marginalia. In 2020 the blend skews hard to Pinot Gris, resulting in a paler color and slightly more grip than the 2019 vintage. This is a juicy, fruity wine that presents fresh, herbaceous aromas derived from stem inclusion, but without a lot of structuring tannin. As with previous vintages, this is a great wine to pair with a wide variety of foods including classic American fall and winter holiday foods.
2020 Amber wine — $26 ($22.10 Subscriber, $19.50 Patron)
100% Semillon from Les Collines Vineyard
Walla Walla AVA, 12.4% ABV
This wine is the most structured of the three 2020 wines, with ample tannin and acidity, and an amber hue in the glass or decanter. It isn’t particularly aromatic—young Semillon never is—but there’s a whole lot happening on the palate. Amber wine, sometimes called orange wine, is made by fermenting white grapes on their skins, seeds, and sometimes stems rather than pressing off clear juice before fermentation. It’s inverted rose: rose is the product of a white wine process applied to red grapes, amber wine is what you get applying a red wine process to white grapes. Check out the scholium on wine styles for more information on this approach to wine making. In this case we fermented Semillon from Les Collines Vineyard on skins for two weeks before pressing to barrel. This is another versatile food wine, but it especially shines with heavier foods: cheese, roast pork and pork belly, quiche, etc.
2020 Red Wine — $28 ($23.80 Subscriber, $21 Patron)
52.2% Zinfandel from Les Collines Vineyard, 47.8% Pinot Noir from Breezy Slope Vineyard
Walla Walla AVA, 11.5% ABV
The 2020 Red Wine is a new bottling for Marginalia. These two vineyards are only about 2 miles apart on the eastern rim of the Walla Walla AVA, but are separated by 400 feet of elevation. The result is that the cool-climate-loving Pinot and the heat-loving Zinfandel ripen at about the same pace, enabling us to pick these varieties at the same time and blend the grapes before fermentation to get a head start marrying the flavors. This wine has the red fruit typical of early picked Zinfandel plus herbaceous notes and structure from the whole cluster Pinot Noir. The wine aged with a small amount of new Oregon White Oak (Quercus Garryana) in addition to neutral and near-neutral French and American barrels; the oak flavor isn’t strong, but the Zinfandel especially seems to like a little toast and spice in the background. Acid structures this wine more than tannin, which again makes for a versatile food pairings.
Food and Wine
All of the Marginalia wines are delicious on their own, but really come onto their own at the table, surrounded by a wide variety fo foods. In the Fall 2021 Culinary Pamphlet linked below I’m featuring three recipes that I think go well these wines: a radicchio and apple salad and a celery root soup that center on delicious fall produce, and a recipe for Khachapuri, a cheese-filled flat bread from the Caucasus that matches extremely well with the tannic 2020 Amber Wine.