Description
Artemisia Farm and Vineyard Vermouth "Solstice" 2024
This highly unique botanical wine is crafted from a base blend of 61% Vidal Blanc and 38% Chambourcin, sourced primarily from Spring House Vineyard with a small addition from Early Mountain Vineyard. The 2024 vintage reflects the warm, humid growing season of Virginia's Northern Piedmont, where the Appalachian mountain terroir yielded highly concentrated, robust hybrid grapes. In the glass, the vermouth displays a deep, slightly hazy ruby color with a rich, viscous appearance, opening into heady aromatics of mountain fruit, vibrant red plums, rose hips, and staghorn sumac, alongside complex secondary layers of tulsi basil and cherry wood. On the palate, this is a medium-bodied and beautifully bittersweet, medium-sweet vermouth that defies traditional European expectations. Full skin-contact and partial stem inclusion provide a powerfully textured, tannic grip and assertive astringency, while concentrated acidity perfectly balances the bittering forces of native wormwood and dandelion leaf through a long, herbaceous finish. Artemisia Farm champions sustainable, bioregional farming, utilizing only climate-adapted hybrid grapes and native Mid-Atlantic botanicals grown largely on their own property. Winemakers Kelly Allen and Andrew Napier employ minimalistic creativity, fermenting the base wine on the skins before infusing it with local botanicals and aging the fortified wine in 66% American oak and 34% wild cherry wood. For food pairings, this vermouth shines alongside smoked beef brisket with a dark cherry barbecue sauce, where the wine's tannic structure complements the rich meat; it also pairs beautifully with a classic Southern pecan pie by allowing the bittersweet wormwood to cut through the dessert's intense sweetness, and serves as a brilliant counterpoint to a board of Virginia country ham, utilizing the wine's herbal verve to balance the salty fat. While this extremely small-production bottling of just 33 cases has not yet been reviewed or scored by major critics like the Wine Advocate or Wine Spectator, its accessible price point makes it an incredibly affordable, irreplaceable artisanal treasure within the American aromatized wine category.
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