Methode Sauvage Moonstones Chenin Blanc

About Methode Sauvage Moonstones Chenin Blanc

Methode Sauvage Moonstones Chenin Blanc is an umami bomb, coaxing you in with its smooth honeyed texture, before dropping the saline pedal. If Steely Dan was drinking wine while recording 1973’s “Countdown to Ecstasy” it was probably Chenin Blanc from the Central Valley labeled as “California Chablis.” Much like the wider yacht rock genre, Chenin Blanc has rarely received the respect it deserves. Although once seen as a simple filler grape in California, Chenin is finally getting attention for making some of the most competently pleasurable and freaky wines in the state. When left to its own devices Chenin will quietly drop an umami bomb in your glass, coaxing you in with its smooth honeyed texture, before attacking your palate with a heavy amplification of acid, dried flowers, and sea breeze salinity. Don’t set out on a yacht rock cruise without it, but be warned…things might get weird.

About Methode Sauvage/Iruai Wines

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, the couple are exploring avant-garde vineyard planting and rehabilitation techniques using the permaculture methods laid out by Masanobu Fukuoka, while formulating their 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.

Finding themselves in a largely untested grape-growing territory, with high elevations and a continental climate, Chad and Michelle have turned Iruai into exploration and celebration of esoteric varieties that flourish in the Alps of Europe. Together they work to grow Iruai’s Western Siskiyou County estate projects, purchase fruit and lease vineyards throughout the Shasta-Cascade, from the Trinity Alps of California to the Siskiyou Mountains of Southern Oregon.

Chad and Michelle seek to make wine with a sense of place by employing no additives and removing no character. Their goal in the vineyard is to let the vines thrive as they would in the wild, and in the cellar, to shepherd each ferment through its own natural development and evolution.