Iruai Wines- Oregon Gamay 2022

Iruai Winery (“ear-oo-eye" … the artist formerly known as Methode Sauvage) was started in 2013 by Chad and Michelle Westbrook Hinds in Berkeley, CA as a gypsy natural wine project, before laying down roots in the mythical Shasta-Cascade mountains of Siskiyou County.

Trading in the urban winery hustle for the vigneron life, we are exploring avant garde vineyard planting and rehabilitation techniques using the permaculture methods laid out by Masanobu Fukuoka, while formulating our own “chaos organics” method of re-enchanting the land. Truly unlike anywhere else in California, Western Siskiyou County feels like a cross between Switzerland and Montana, cut with a rain shadow from Mount Shasta that divides it starkly between high mountain prairie and dense alpine forests. 

The constant Muse of the natural wine movement, Gamay is the clever instigator, aspiring to incendiary beauty and pleasure with a cool and casual air of sprezzatura. Not content to just be the prototypical zesty and buoyant red wine, it has remade wine culture in its own image. Although still finding its footing in Oregon, Gamay has been a quick study of this new terrain, resulting in heady flavors of forest laced red and blue fruits, and an unmistakable chalky minerality like the brisk lift of nose candy at a Serge Gainsbourg concert in the '70s. I hope this Summer you choose your set and setting with our Gamay in mind: bucolic and wild, fashionably late, and late into the night.

Fir Tips . Raspberry PEZ . Blueberry Margarita . Chalk

FOOD - bavette (steak) frites

Type: Red
Producer: Iruai 
Varietal: Gamay
Country: United States
Region: Oregon
Farming: Organic