North America | Oregon | Fossil & Fawn

Fossil & Fawn

Fossil Fawn 1 JmoNme1editweb.jpg

Wines

 

Summary

Fossil & Fawn is Jenny Mosbacher and Jim Fischer. They started their label as a completely reasonable idea in the late summer of 2011, and it quickly spiraled into a much more complex, frustrating, terrifying, and unbelievably rewarding venture. Beginning with the notion of making a small amount of wine from family vineyards as a single-site bottling, the plan was to have a nice example to show to potential buyers of the Pinot noir and Pinot gris grown there. Somewhere along the line, figuring that for all the effort, they might as well make it an official wine label. After a series of fits and starts (mostly fits), Fossil & Fawn was born proper as a wine label, nearly two years after conjuring up that very reasonable idea.

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, we culture it from the vineyard itself. It also means as-little-as-necessary sulfur additions and aging all of our wines in barrels, with very little new oak. The minimalist, natural approach is a nice way of saying we do things the hard way, by-hand. The upside is that we end up with wines that we like. Wines that have acidity, structure, and balance that will brilliantly compliment dinner tonight, or be a worthy reward for patience after a few years in the cellar.
Silvershot Vineyards is their home site, our “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. Jim and Bill originally named the site Crowley Station Vineyards to honor the historic railroad station located at the foot of Holmes Hill, itself a reference to Solomon Kimsey Crowley, who settled the area in 1855. In 2016, it was renamed Silvershot Vineyards, for the family horse of the same name that once roamed the land that would become the first vineyard block.

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, we discovered a smattering of Chardonnay inter-planted in one of the Pinot noir blocks. All of the vines are dry-farmed (no irrigation) and most are own-rooted (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.

Fossil Fawn 2 Carbonic Wholecluster Pinot Gris Fermentation photo by Jim Fischer.jpg
Fossil Fawn 4 Fossil Covered Rocks at Silvershot Vineyards photo by Jim Fischer.jpg