Fable Farm’s Amida is an orange wine of La Crescent grapes sourced from Lincoln Peak Vineyard. The fruit was lightly crushed before macerating for over a month in an open-top stainless steel vessel. After the cap dropped, the wine was pressed and moved to neutral barrels for aging. All fermentations were native, and the wine received no sulfite addition.
The resulting elixir is a copper-salmon color with faint cloudiness. Its fragrance is expansive, floral, and savory: I get acacia honey, tea rose, wildflowers, orange blossom, dried straw, beeswax. The palate continues the theme of field and apiary, adding bass notes of stone fruits and candied citrus peel. The wine is satisfyingly weighty on the tongue, yet its lift of acidity floats this all away at the finish. In the deep distance there is a sense of herbs.
The wine has a kind of sweetness, an innocence. It’s evocative and dreamlike, a wine that reminds me of hay’s first cutting, crickets in July, the weight of a just-picked apple, my hand feeling grass. It’s one of the best Vermont wines I’ve tasted.
2016 Fable Farm Fermentory La Crescent Amida Vermont
14% abv | $30; 40 cases made
