Hiyu Wine Farm Tzum Solais Spring Ephemeral, Hood River County, USA 2022

Twenty-two miles from Mount Hood’s snowy peak, in an alpine river valley teeming with birds and oscillating light, lives a wild farm. Cows, chickens, and pigs graze among vines, and fungi and flowers proliferate as gardens merge with forest. Our wines are exciting for their wild exuberance when they are young, but they will only reveal their full potential to unite disparate time, place, and experience when stored properly for many years — a minimum of five years, but ideally 8 – 15 years following vintage — in a dark place between 53 – 60 degrees Fahrenheit and at 80 – 85% humidity.

Tzum wines come from small, specific fields, situated between the rainforest and the desert, throughout the Gorge. These parcels embody diverse terrains, vantage points, and climates. Whether single variety or field blend, each planting captures the essence and identity of its environment.

This is from a plantation on a flat and sandy plateau bounded to the south by basalt boulders and sand dunes. It is planted to all of the fifteen allowable varieties historically planted in Chateauneuf-du-Pape, but with a far greater ratio of white to red grapes than may have ever existed there. This allows for a far more perfumed and ethereal expression of the sort of flavors one encounter from these grapes. In this sense it is closest in character to Envinate’s Margalagua or Salvo Foti’s Vigna Bosco; both plantings of very old vines with roughly equal amounts of red and white grapes. The composition allows for the production of a red that allows one to access the ethereal side of this arid, desert landscape. 80 cases made.