Our Wine

It All Begins in The Dirt with Nature!

By assessing and monitoring the status and requirement of each grapevine throughout the season and tailoring the activities accordingly, healthy fruit at harvest will result in reduced intervention by our winemaking team.

Our winegrapes are hand-sorted up to three separate times on the morning of harvest; once in the field and while picking...

...once on an inclined sorting table feeding the de-stemmer, and once again, if necessary, as de-stemmed individual berries passing over a grated, vibrating sorting table that sifts out any green berries, raisins, or other undesirable material

The fruit is then allowed to cold soak for up to seven days while the native yeast fermentation slowly begins. The fermenting must is then punched down three or four times daily during peak fermentation, which lasts about 10 to 14 days. The fermented wine is then drained directly to barrel via gravity (i.e. no pumping), then pressed. Following malolactic fermentation, the wines will age on lees until the following spring, when they are racked off lees and blended.

Winemaking

The winemaking philosophy embraced by DANCIN for our OREGON BARBERA is in many ways a return to the traditional methods that were largely forgotten during the modernization of winemaking in the second half of the 20th century. These include techniques such as native yeast fermentation, fermentations which are punched down by hand up to three times daily, minimal sulfites used during processing, and moving the wine by gravity whenever possible to create a truly authentic wine. We are judicious in our approach to aging our Barbera, using only very tight grain, three-year air-dried French oak barrels for a period of 17 1/2 months. Our estate winery consists of two separate spaces built into the hillside which facilitates the art of gravity fed winemaking. It has become apparent that these techniques, which were once considered inefficient and old-school, have in fact proven to be the true path to hand-made, artisanal wine.