Day Wines, "Lemonade" 2021

Grower: Day Wines
Region: Yamhill-Carlton AVA, Oregon
Grape Varieties: Pinot Noir
Viticulture: Organic, Biodynamic
Category: Rose
Size: 750 ml bottle

Beloved Dundee, Oregon wine producer, Brianne Day, has quite the story. In 2006, recently divorced and alone in the world, having been cut off from her family after abandoning the Jehovah’s Witness religion with which she was raised, the spunky blonde with a trademark pixie cut sold everything she owned and began traveling through wine regions all over the world. Over 8 years she visited 80 different regions, working at wineries in Burgundy, Argentina, Australia, and New Zealand, before re-establishing her home base in Oregon and picking up a “winemaking habit”, as she describes it. To support this habit, she waited tables at Little Bird in Portland, where she met a wealthy couple who eventually ended up funding her fledgling wine business. Now she’s making 2500 cases of wine per year, working only with small family growers working organically or biodynamically. She’s also paying her good luck forward – her new 14,000-square-foot winery in the Dundee Hills was designed to be sort of a commune, where small-scale producers working naturally can rent facilities for their own wine labels.

From producer, Brianne Day:

"What a joy it was to make this wine out of want and not out of need. While the year 2021 gave us plenty of practice in continuing to “make the best of it”, the vintage of 2021 made making the best very easy. Our 2021 Lemonade continues our efforts in championing our small growers, and much of this fruit was contracted just after the 2020 harvest from growers who were unable to sell their fruit in 2020. It was sourced entirely from organically grown vineyards across the Willamette Valley - seven in total. The vineyards ranged from the Chehalem Mountains in the north, all the way down to the Southern Willamette Valley near Eugene. With the diversity of area, ripening all of the fruit to the right levels took time and we picked & pressed this fruit over the course of three weeks. This really allowed us to pick different sites at different levels of ripeness with the blend in mind. Doing it this way meant that absolutely no additions were needed or used to achieve the exact balance we wanted in the wine. Spontaneously fermented, native partial malolactic fermentation, with no additions save a small amount of SO2. This year the wine is pale pink, full of lemon, pink apple, pink grapefruit, river stones, bright berries and flowers."

Grapes were gently pressed whole cluster, and juice was cold settled to remove heavy lees. It was racked the next day to stainless steel where it was compiled and began native fermentation. Fermentation was active and frothy! Each lot was racked 4 or 5 times and blended through racking. After primary fermentation completed and malo fermentation reached a level of 1.21 g/l malic acid remaining, the wine was cold stabilized, and then sulfured, filtered and bottled.