5th Element: Our Skin-Contact Orange Wine

The 5th Element label has had two lives. The version we made for years was a fortified, seven-vintage solera; that wine now lives under our Sherry label. The bottle wearing the 5th Element label today is a different wine entirely: a skin-contact orange wine, made from the same field blend of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc, but built around a completely different idea.

What 5th Element Is Now

Our 5th Element is a skin-fermented orange wine, made from a field blend of Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc grown on our Hillier farm. The grapes are crushed and left to ferment on their skins, the way orange wines are supposed to be — not because it's trendy, but because that's the technique that pulls colour, texture, and a real backbone of tannin out of white grapes.

What you get in the bottle: pale amber in the glass, a nose of dried apricot, citrus peel, and a touch of beeswax, and a palate that's drier and grippier than people expect from a white-grape wine. It drinks like a light red with the texture of a white. Pour it cool, not cold.

Tasting the New 5th Element

Skin-contact whites are confusing the first time. The colour is wine-bar Instagram bait, but the flavour is rougher than you expect — grippy tannins, savoury herbs, dried fruit instead of fresh. The trick is to stop comparing it to white wine.

What it pairs with:

• Anything with funk — aged cheeses, our Whipped Feta Dip with hot honey, kimchi-anything (start with our Kimchi Dog).
• Pan Tumaca, the charred sourdough with smashed tomato and garlic oil from the menu — the wine's tannins cut the olive oil beautifully.
• Roasted chicken or pork with herbs.
• Anything ferment-y. Sauerkraut, miso, pickled things.

What it does NOT pair with: delicate fish, citrus desserts, anything that needs to stay light on the palate. Drink Sauvignon Blanc for those.

Why We Renamed the Old Wine

Quick version: we made two decisions at the same time. The fortified solera wine deserved a name that put new drinkers in the right headspace before the first sip, so it became Sherry. The 5th Element label freed up, and it fit our skin-contact project better than anything else we'd been calling it. Two wines, same vineyard DNA, completely different ideas about what to do with the grapes.

The full story of the solera — the Volatile Acidity, the Amontillado inspiration, the still that saved it — lives over on the Sherry article. It's worth a read if you're a fan of how wines actually get made.