Vinification:

Primarily composed of juice from our third leaf cold hardy french hybrid grape known as Chelois, this abundant producer gave us more grapes than expected in 2023, so we whole-cluster pressing .68 tons in our new Prospero SK blatter press.

Chelois (like Chambourcin) is a teinturier grape meaning its juice is red, not clear like most red grapes. As a result, even the shortest amount of skin contact results in a very dark red rose wine.

While the color still turned out a beautiful blush color, the juice we fermented was extremely delicate and aromatic. This wine was fermented cool using glycol over several weeks before. being racked and aged on the lees for 8 months prior to bottling.

The wine was blended with a bulk vinifera blend from St Julien Winery (Paw Paw, Michigan) to increase volume, and backsweetened to 0.6-0.7 g/L using Rose
sweet reserve juice. The wine was cartridge filtered at bottling. No fining of the wine was required.