François Morissette has a thing he likes to say: "I don't make wine for Ontario. I make wine for the world." It sounds a little arrogant, a little "okay, sure buddy," until you taste one and realize, oh. He's not wrong. His wines are worldly in the best way. Stylish, refined, impossibly pure.
This is 100% Lemberger (AKA Blaufränkisch) from the Knizat Vineyard, harvested October 18th, 2024. Hand-sorted, 100% destemmed, fermented in large concrete tanks with indigenous yeasts, pressed after 4 weeks, then aged on its lees for another 12 weeks in the same vessels. Bottled unfined and unfiltered.
A customer wrote us something on our wine subscription form that stuck: that she always expected wines to meet her on her terms, instead of meeting them on theirs. I think about those words every time I taste this Primesautier. Because the first sip is a little jarring. You're like, whoa, what is happening here. And then you pause, and you think maybe this isn't the wine being weird. Maybe this is me being too strict with my own idea of what a wine should be. Maybe I should just be curious about what Lemberger feels like in Ontario.
How "special" is this wine? Let's put it this way: imagine blood orange doing something very sexy to cranberries. That's this. Plus a hit of guava, and acid so well-integrated it just feels like the wine is vibrating. A cheeky character, for sure. But one worth meeting on its own terms.
