En Cavale 'Who Goes There?' 2024 Skin Ferment White California

750ml bottle
12% abv

A salty and textured skin fermented blend of Sauvignon Blanc, Albariño, and Verdelho. Delicious!

A blend of Sauvignon Blanc (around 75%), and equal parts Verdelho and Albariño, with an average of 3.5 weeks skin contact across the varieties. Verdelho and Albariño are co-fermented and pressed to neutral oak barrels. The Sauvignon Blanc is pressed off to 3 and 5 year old Acacia barrels in a nod to a few Loire producers who have inspired Chad and Wolfgang, namely Villemade, Courtois, and Puzelat.

This bottling was named after a story from John W. Campbell Jr. called “Who Goes There?” that was later made into John Carpenter’s 1982 masterpiece “The Thing,” about a group of scientists that settle into the long Antarctic winter with some pull-top beers, a bunch of whiskey, and a strange dog that turned up at their camp chased by a helicopter that later crashed on the ice. Turns out the dog is a shape-shifting alien lifeform capable of consuming all of humanity should it escape Antarctica! Both of these adaptations reveal the anxiety and doubt that lurks just beneath the surface of nearly all human endeavors. This wine was made in the spirit of conquering anxiety and charging ahead into the darkness of the unknown.

En Cavale is a collaboration between good friends Wolfgang Weber and Chad Hinds (Iruai). Their idea was to team up and make soulful, accessible expressions of old-school Californian wine with a hat tip to many of their favorite wines from France and Italy. All of the fruit is sourced from organically-farmed vineyards and extreme care is practiced in the cellar with native yeasts carrying out fermentations, sulfur additions kept to a minimum (if any are made at all), and no filtration.