If you got it, flaunt it.
You wanted an orange wine with swagger, and you're getting an orange wine with swagger. This is Strut, a juicy, groovy, skin-contact white wine that will leave your mouth watering for mo'.
Let's start with the existential question: just what is "orange" wine? Well, effectively, it's a white wine made like a red wine. Traditionally, with white wine, white grapes are pressed and the juice is immediately separated from their skins. With a skin-contact white wine like Strut, we press the white grapes and then let them soak on the skins for days or weeks to extract tropical flavors and aromas and that gorgeous orange hue.
For Strut, we start at the historic Fanucchi-Wood Road Vineyard in Russian River Valley. Originally planted in the late-1970s, this 7-acre plot of Trousseau Gris remains the only documented planting of this variety in the US. This is where all the cult and hipster-ass wineries get their shit from it. It's a legendary vineyard. We love working with it not only because the historical significance, but because this variety is what takes our skin-contact white wine from yellowish in color to Sunkist orange.
Joining the party are Grenache Blanc, Albariño, Gewürztraminer, Riesling, Grenache, Grüner Veltliner, and Roussanne. For this project, we let the Trousseau Gris rub up on its skins for 14 days after pressing, while the other grapes enjoyed 1-12 days of skin contact to pull out different characteristics, textures, and flavors. Our Gewürztraminer even spent some time in a Cocciopesto vessel for some subtle oxygen exchange, helping these grapes harmoniously blend together.
But enough talk, let's let this wine strut its stuff. Vibrant and luminously orange in the glass, the wine explodes with tropical mandarin and honeydew aromas. Allow it to glide around your tongue and soak up the juicy flavors of tangerine, peach, and nectarine. Thanks to the skin-contact, it has a silky, medium body, but enough zest and acidity to make each sip oh so refreshing.
When it came to the visual look, there's only one person in the world capable of capturing this type of sexiness: Sita Kaylin. If that name sounds familiar to you, she's our longtime co-conspirator, responsible for labels like Vinyl Love, Wild Child, Truth or Dare, Arcade Summer and more. This label is from a particularly cool series she shot, where she projected sensual scenes onto industrial settings. Being a winery into automotive culture and sexy imagery, this visual really struck us. Not the wine and the bottle both have legs for days.
