2022 "Fest" SPARKLING

DARK HORSE ESTATE WINERY is located a 10 minute drive by car (or 25 minutes when driving the Hessenland Van) to our South. Their 85 acre vineyard, planted in June/July 2015 is home to similar soil conditions found in grape growing regions such as Bourgogne, Alsace, & Loire Valley in France. Their Vidal plants thrive in these conditions and great yields have been documented Vintage to Vintage. Most known for being developed into "Ice Wine"

- this high yielding grape can produce high sugar levels at harvest even in cooler climates - and when coupled with it's fresh acidic character - can be a fantastic still wine - or in this case - the backbone of a wonderful sparkling wine.

This Sparkling is made in the "Tank Method.

"The major difference between the tank method and the traditional method is the removal of the individual bottle as the vessel used to turn a still wine into a sparkling one. Instead, base wines are added together with the sugar and yeast mixture (Tirage) into a large tank. As the wine has a second fermentation, the CO2 released from the fermentation causes the tank to pressurize, thus imparting the wine with the carbonantion.

For this, we employed the D.H.E.W winemaker (Mark Pistor) to make our Sparkling Wine using Estate Grown Grapes from D.H.E.W. This is a small part of a growing relationship between our two wineries. This relationship has been constantly evolving and started even before we at Schatz Winery released our first Vintage.