Current Vintage: 2024

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The 2024 Vintage of this wine is the winemaker's favorite wine from our home property. Loaded with acidity and tropical fruit flavors, this wine is exciting and pops with pineapple flavor. 2024 was a drought year. The berries were small and flavorful. There were many clusters with low overall weight each. We made both this still version of Brianna and the Amber Pet Nat version - Lightning Bug.

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We harvested 2400lbs of grapes for this Brianna wine and an additional 600lbs for Lightning Bug. So harvest was right around a ton and a half in 2024.

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We kept the grapes and juice cold at each step in the process. We used dry ice on the grapes, left them cold overnight, and then pressed and added more dry ice. Dry ice keeps fermentation and oxidation from happening. We settled the juice then racked it to the chiller tank. We set the chiller to 20°C to keep the fermentation from blowing off too much of the aromatic quality of the wine. 

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Vintage: 2023

If you are holding a bottle of the Brianna 2023, think about this as a unicorn. This was the only vintage dated wine we made in 2023.

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This was a tough year for grape growing. It started with a warm spring, then a late frost in May, then more rain throughout the rest of the year than we have ever seen. 95% of the grape crop in NH was lost to the early frost. We stuck with the idea that even in a tough year, one can grow great wines organically. The Brianna grape is so far the best we've seen to prove this out. These grapes were picked as late as we could to prevent losing the crop. 

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We cold crushed these grapes using dry ice to keep them from fermenting. We then pressed and added more dry ice to cold settle the juice. Next, we racked it into the chill tank and kicked off fermentation. As it got too warm (34°C), we cooled the tank to 20°C. As the fermentation proceeded, we dropped the temperature again to -4°C to stop the fermentation to leave a tiny bit of residual sugar. We immediately cold stabilized the wine, filtered it, and bottled it.

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The result is the most spectacular bottle of Brianna we have produced. This is the goal for future vintages as well.

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Check out the gallery below for photos and videos of this process.