North America | Oregon | Fossil & Fawn

Fossil & Fawn

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Wines

 

Summary

Fossil & Fawn is Jenny Mosbacher and Jim Fischer. Not too interested in bold manifestos or style declarations - their goal is to make wines that they like executed with a natural approach that allows the vineyard to do the talking. That means instead of buying yeast, they culture it from the vineyard itself. It also means as-little-as-necessary sulfur additions and aging all of their wines in barrels, with very little new oak.

Silvershot Vineyards is their home site, their “estate” if you will (you shouldn’t). The Fischer family collected cuttings from neighboring vineyards and started their own nursery in 1999. The first vines were put in the ground the following year on a five-acre field with a gentle south-facing slope and the shallow, rockiest soils on the property.

They farm fifteen acres of vineyards, fourteen of which are Pinot noir (114, 115, 777, Pommard, and a few "suitcase" clones of unknown provenance), with an acre of Pinot gris (Colmar clone). A few years into it, they discovered a smattering of Chardonnay inter-planted in one of the Pinot noir blocks. All of the vines are dry-farmed and most are ungrafted, pushing through thin sedimentary soils and fractured sandstone that were once the seafloor during the Oligocene epoch. The site is south/southwest-facing on Holmes Hill at the exit of Holmes Gap (better known as the end of the Van Duzer Corridor) and gets strong, cooling marine breezes. Wines made from these grapes have that distinctive Eola-Amity quality: displaying great spice, structure and clarity of fruit with pronounced minerality from the old oceanic soils.

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