2022 SRH Riesling - Epsilon

Soil. Vines. Wines.  This is the order in which great wine is made.  Ampelos is the Greek word for vine.  The  Greek symbol Epsilon: “small selection” we use for a small batch of wines that we make when we come across a special batch.  We only made 32 cases of this special wine!  

In 2013 we planted this small block of 0.4 acres of Riesling clone 49, which has its origins back to Alsace.  The goal was to provide organic and biodynamic grapes as a blending component for our Rose.  As we harvested it the first few years we realized that we got more grapes than we needed for the Rose - that was the beginning of the Ampelos Riesling!     

The relationship we cultivate with our land is paramount in producing hand crafted, minimally invasive wines that both whisper and shout about the terroir from which they are grown.   Our commitment to natural winemaking is evident in every sip.

Wine Making Style:

• The wine making goal for the Riesling is to retain the flavors of the freshly picked fruit and not to mask it with oak or other distracting components
• We cold fermented it at about 50 degrees for about a month to ensure that the fruit flavors do not  burn off.  It is fermented in 75 gal. stainless steel barrels
• The primary fermentation utilizes the natural wild yeast that comes in on the grapes
• The wine does not go through the second (malolactic) fermentation – that way we keep the minerality as well as the crispness of the fruit in the wine
• To reduce our energy use, we have replaced the electricity hungry traditional cold stabilization with a new product based on manoproteins – the results are amazing and we feel even more “green” by doing so.
• We set just one stainles barrel aside for this bottling
• The wine was sterile filtered before bottling.