“A fresh and crunchy orange wine aged in clay amphorae and crafted by a highly skilled winemaker trained in Beaune.  It’s fun, it’s cool, and mostly importantly it tastes great with vivid freshness, great structure, and not a trace of funkiness”
 
I’ll be the first to admit that in the past I’ve been somewhat skeptical of overly hip wines.  After all, one of the things I love in a great bottle of wine is its ability to clearly express the place it was grown, and after trying a dozen different bottles of hip wines that tasted more like kombucha, it’s safe to say orange wine was not top of mind when I was in Oregon sourcing Insider Wine’s first suppliers.  I was wrong. As soon as I had my first sip of Suzor’s Wild Child, a skin-contact pinot gris aged in a mixture of clay amphorae and neutral oak, I was hooked.  It’s an ever changing wine, at times displaying almost fruit-punch-like fresh and candied fruit and at other times a savory earthiness from it’s time in the amphorae. With the weather warming up here in Ontario, it’s exactly what I want to pair with outdoor meals and fresh spring cooking.
 
Suzor Wines was founded back in 2011 with only five barrels of pinot noir.  Since then, husband and wife Greg and Mellissa have been crafting consistently outstanding wines, patiently growing their production by partnering with top growing sites throughout the Willamette Valley. Greg, who studied Viticulture and Oenology in Beaune handles the winemaking and Melissa manages operations and growing the brand.   Greg’s family is French, and summers spent in the Loire Valley growing up inspired him to become a winemaker.   Melissa has a background in hospitality, having worked at some of the top restaurants in Europe where she fell in love with wine and started to dream of opening her own winery.
 
Greg and Melissa sourced the pinot gris for Wild Child from a certified sustainable vineyard in the Willamette Valley. The wine fermented 12 days on the skins before aging in an Oregon made amphora (40%) and neutral French oak (60%). They believe that aging the wine in this way brings out the rusticity in the wine and also preserves the fruit.  In the glass, Wild Child  displays vibrant fruit, both fresh and candied as well as hints of earth and minerals from the amphora.  Serve Wild Child with a slight chill and pair it with a big fresh salad or a picnic.