Muscat, Alsace, France

A deeply spiced & aromatically POTENT orange wine from one of every natural wine person’s sought after producers! Twelfth generation winemakers Jean-Pierre and Chantal Frick are basically celebrity artists in their field of natural wine. Since taking over the Frick family’s 12-hectare, Pfaffenheim, Alsace estate in 1981, they have become certified biodynamic. When it comes to vinification they live by a nothing addeth, nothing taketh rule – no sulphur additions (with the exception of a touch for off-dry wines) and no filtering. Who doesn’t love sipping the microscopic grape particles that make wine feel like a real agricultural product?! And having spent five days on skins – giving it both a persimmon hue and an underripe persimmon texture – there’s even more rogue grape flecks to enjoy. A bottle of this muscat maceration is ostensibly exactly like early ‘aughts artist couple Christo and Jean-Claude’s saffron fabric gates that briefly blew through Central Park: it’s a golden river winding through leafless trees, a warm shadow, spectral visitations from a dead summer yet an autumn here to stay. AKA, it smells like peach preserves, bulk barn dried mango, rose petals tucked into an old book by Samuel Beckett, the pack of wild ewes gnawing on a pumpkin with such happy determination they make you wonder, hey what’s my life’s free pumpkin? Drink this with a handful of Chinese five-spice walnuts and drink in the view while you’re at it – whether that be a grand vista or a beautiful friend.