Traditional Method: The first fermentation is feral (wild and without the addition of nutrients or enzymes) and ferments dry in tank located on our property.  The second fermentation is in bottle: we are careful to take the primary fermented-dry juice to another facility, off-site, and there we add the sugar and yeast to the juice prior to bottling for the second fermentation.  No commercial yeast is used on our property. The wine is not filtered.  The wines will spend approximately four to six months on lees after which the bottles are hand riddled and machine disgorged.  All the wines are finished brut natural in style, with no dosage added.

Ancestrale Method (aka “pet-nat”): After pressing the grapes, the juice wild ferments in a neutral barrel and at precisely the right moment (approx. 2 brix of sugar) the juice is hand bottled by gravity flow and allowed to finish fermenting in the bottle.  As you can imagine, without filtering, the ancestrale contains greater quantities of natural lees and some particulates from the original pressing.  Through riddling, and disgorging, we can remove almost all of the sediment but some will remain.  Also, without filtering the wine maintains a natural cloudiness that will dissipate over time.

Fortified Sparkling: The issue is high alcohol may not be able to suspend the bars of pressure required to make fizz.  For this reason we looked to frizzante style, e.g. injecting gas, with lower bars of pressure to create the perfect balance of pressure we could attain through injection without blowing the bottle.  The result is a sparkling fortified wine that curiously you can barely visually notice the small bubbles in the glass, because of the dark colour of the wine base, however they are quite present on the palate providing that gentle crackling sensation so characteristic of sparkling wines.