A Happy Accident

The story behind our sparkling Gewürztraminer

Some wines start with a plan. Others start out according to plan before taking an unexpected turn.

Our 2024 Gewürztraminer was supposed to be one of those wines that came together from two vineyards. We had three-year-old Gewürztraminer vines growing here at Twisted Pines, and we planned to supplement our harvest with Gewürztraminer from another Virginia vineyard. The plan was to combine the two.

Then we pressed our grapes. And the juice from our estate grapes came out pink.

Not just a little different from the Gewürztraminer we were used to seeing, but noticeably different from the fruit coming from the other vineyard. That wasn't exactly part of the plan.

A change of plans

We could have blended the two lots together anyway. That was the original plan, after all. But once we saw the color of our Gewürztraminer, we started wondering what might happen if we didn't.

So we kept them separate.

What started as a simple decision to keep two lots of the same grape apart gave us an opportunity we hadn't originally planned for: two distinctly different wines from the same varietal. The difference in color and flavor profile gave us a chance to see how much the different terroir of each vineyard could influence the finished wine.

We decided to embrace the difference.

Then we added a little sparkle

Our Twisted Pines Gewürztraminer completed its initial fermentation as a still wine before we filtered it in preparation for bottling. At that point, we could have simply bottled it and called it a day. After all, we already had two distinctly different expressions of the same grape, each reflecting the vineyard where it was grown.

But if we were already doing things a little differently, why stop there? We pride ourselves on our Twist, after all.

So we decided to turn this one into a sparkling wine. We added fermentable sugar at bottling and sealed the bottles with crown caps, giving the yeast what it needed to begin another fermentation inside the bottle. The bottles then spent a couple of months resting while that second fermentation created the bubbles and the wine continued to develop.

It was our first attempt at making something other than a still wine, and that's part of what made this wine so much fun.

Why “A Happy Accident”?

Because none of this was really supposed to happen. The plan was to blend two lots of Gewürztraminer.

Then our grapes gave us pink juice. So we kept them separate during the aging process. And somewhere along the way, that unexpected difference became an opportunity to make something we hadn't originally planned to make.

The pink hue was the first happy accident. Deciding to treat it as its own wine was the second. And turning it into a sparkling wine? Well, that was us deciding to see where the accident might take us.

A little twist of fate

The finished wine is lightly sparkling, with the fruity and floral character we love from Gewürztraminer and a little extra liveliness from the bubbles.

Every bottle we open... every bottle a customer takes home... every bottle we sip ourselves is a reminder that some of the most interesting things in winemaking don't always start with a master plan.

Sometimes you press the grapes and get something you didn't expect.

Sometimes you make a small change.

Sometimes you decide to keep going with the unexpected instead of putting things back the way you planned them.

And sometimes, you end up with a Happy Accident.

We're pretty happy with this one.