Drink This Wine with Molly Baz "A Gluggable Skin Contact-y White" 2024

Drink This Wine's 2024 "Skin Contact-y White" just keeps getting better. This is their 5th vintage, and each year Molly Baz falls more deeply in love than the last. It’s the type of orange wine that knows it’s orange, but isn’t screaming it from across a crowded, loud bar. Elevated and clean, but with plenty of tannin. Molly says this wine ellicits visions of an empty plastic fruit roll-up wrapper on the floor of her elementary school cafeteria. Lunch line sloppy joes would make a mean pairing, but you’ll be just as happy lugging it to the beach with a cold turkey sandwich and some salt‘n'vinny potato chips. Plop down in the sand, crack open the playmate cooler and take the bottle straight to the face.

This wine is 40% Riesling for structure, floral elements such as jasmine and a minerality from the natural acidity of the grape itself; 40% Sauvignon Blanc for extreme tropical and stone fruit aromatics such as mango, passionfruit and apricot; and 20% Pinot Gris for density, the texture of red stones and verticality through gooseberries, etc.

One tank held only Riesling on skins for 16 days. Another held only Sauvignon Blanc for 21 days on skins. A third tank held Pinot Gris on skins for 14 days, and finally, a fourth tank held a composite of the blend in all three in a 40/40/20 combination. All wines were drained and pressed back to stainless steel for élevage, aside from a small portion of the Sauvignon Blanc and Pinot Gris, which was sent to neutral French Oak. The wine was sulfured post malolactic fermentation and blended up to stainless steel tank six months after pressing for bottling.

Drink This Wine is a collaboration between cook/food writer Molly Baz and Oregon wine hero Andy Young (The Marigny). They only procure grapes from farmers who are as committed to the land as they are, farming by hand and never with chemicals. If it doesn't come from Mother Earth, it's not in their wine. Fermentation is done with naturally occurring yeasts, present on the grape skins and in the winery's environment -- no cultured or commercial yeast strains.

Making wine this way takes a lot of love and a lot of time. Unlike more commercial wineries, they don't use additives to correct mistakes or change the nature of the wine. Simply put, before they can pour wine into your glass, thousands of things have already gone right. Making you happy is one thousand and one.