Pale, luminous red teetering on the edge of rosé — as light in color as a red wine gets before it stops being one. The aromatics are floral and high-toned: wild raspberry and strawberry, rose water, orange peel, sage, and desert scrub. The palate is deliberately weightless, all perfume and lift, with fine dusty tannin and bright acidity holding a cloud of red fruit in suspension. The finish is delicate, herbal, and short by design — this is a wine built for transparency, not power.
This is one of the most singular things you can put in a wine club. Hiyu is the Columbia Gorge farm of Nate Ready — a Master Sommelier who ran the floor at The French Laundry before walking away to farm — and his partner China Tresemer, who paints the labels. They regrafted their original vines onto 80-plus grape varieties and turned the property into a field-blend "wonderland," farmed wild permaculture-style with pigs and geese instead of tractors, releasing around 40 cuvées a year. "Spring Ephemeral" is a style, not just a name: whole-cluster fruit, native-yeast ferment, short skin contact, bottled young and unfiltered with almost no sulfur, released each spring to catch a fleeting moment. Fionn comes off Scorched Earth, a plot of deep black volcanic sand at the edge of a desert pasture. Ready even likens the Gorge's snow-late-into-May climate to alpine Savoie and Val d'Aosta. This is a wine that argues a red can be ethereal.
