Something for Nothing – Sparkling Honey Piquette

Something for Nothing
Sparkling Honey Piquette – 7% ABV
1 Bottle – 750 mL 

We are once again INCREDIBLY excited to unveil our newest non-beer fermentation project, and we are just over the moon with how well this turned out. “Not For Nothing” is a Piquette made from rehydrating the skins left over from “Super Blossom”, our Whole Cluster, Carbonic Maceration, Barrel-Rested, 100% NC Organic, Natural Orange Wine. As if that first Wine wasn’t complicated enough…yeesh.

Now, let’s just dig into the specifics real quick! For the Wine, “Super Blossom”, we took a blend of Whole Cluster 100% NC-grown Organic Grapes (sourced by our buddies Pleb Winery, who rule so hard!) that consisted of Marechal Foch, Catawba, Seyval Blanc varietals, and then laid them down to rest in a sanitized and CO2-purged vessel, where they sat undisturbed for 3 months to go through an extended Carbonic Maceration.

We then crushed and destemmed the whole clusters, and put it all back into the vessel to allow further fermentation on the skins. After 72 hours, we put the Grape Must through our press and racked it into an Oak barrel.

AND THEN WE REHYDRATED THOSE SKINS with some extra fine Asheville water and just a tiny dash of Orange Blossom Honey from Walker Honey Farms in Austin, TX. We let that finish fermentation and rest for a full week before pressing the skins yet again and racking that into an Oak barrel to rest.

After 3 months in the barrel, we racked the now-finished Piquette into a blending tank and bottled it with another small dash of Orange Blossom Honey, where it has been bottle conditioning for an additional 7 months. Wow! That’s a lot!

We experience soft and beautiful floral aromas of Violet and Lavender and Orange Blossom, a zippy minerality, a soft and spritzy Lemon Lime Gatorade Wine Cooler sorta vibe, and waves of White Pear, Lemon, and Honeydew rind. All of this is wrapped up in a beautiful funk and acidity that’s surprisingly balanced by the dry and fruity body. We realize this is a bit of YET ANOTHER bastardization of the style, but we thought we’d put our own little riff on Piquette if we were gonna do it at all.