Little Farm Pied de Cuve Orange 2023

A bold, intense yet fresh skin contact white made from Riesling. The nose shows typically powerful orange zest, tea leaf and ripe stone fruit notes. The palate is dry, quite full bodied and very textural combining spice, zest, minerality and orange zest phenolic grip.

A great food pairing wine with middle-eastern spices and umami.

Enjoy through 2030

Similkameen Valley

2023 was a tough year in British Columbia. The winter of 2022-23 saw very cold temperatures that damaged many of the primary buds and killed vines in many vineyards. At Little Farm we didn't fair too badly. Initially, our crop was only down about 30% from the cold weather. But then the starlings struck. With little food in the valley from the cold devastation to vineyards and orchards, the birds went in a frenzy, and despite netting the grapes and deploying flicker tape to scare them off, they rampaged through the vines eating about half of what we had. So in the end, we ended up with about 1/3 of a normal vintage. At least the quality is good, but the quantity is small.

Pied de Cuve are Little Farm's natural wines. these are wines that receive almost no intervention from start to finish and are therefore a pure reflection of the place, the grape and the vintage. Pied de Cuve is a technique to start a fermentation using only the yeasts that are naturally occurring on the skin of the grapes.

The organic Riesling grapes for this wine were foot trodden and left to ferment naturally on the skins for around 14 days before gentle pressing and then finishing their fermentation and spending another 8 months ageing on the lees in stainless steel before settling then bottling unfined and unfiltered in August 2024.

Little Farm Winery is the small hands-on operation of Rhys Pender MW and Alishan Driediger. It started with a passion for wine and developed into growing and producing Chardonnay and Riesling from our Mulberry Tree Vineyard at our home in Cawston. Our goal is to make wines with minimal manipulation and intervention and to really capture the growing season.

Little Farm Winery will never be big and will always focus on making small batches of single-vineyard wine that reflect each site´s unique characteristics. Our goal is to make interesting, characterful, natural-ish wines and look after our little farm.