The Vigne Réserve
de Garde Brewing

Because we can't NOT try to improve on an already good thing...

From time to time we've started to select a particular barrel that shows potential for further development from some grape varietals, and continue aging it after the rest are blended.

Our 'réserve' series of wine-grape beers typically blend multiple different vintages of our beer that were fermented and aged with grapes, then conditioned in a third round of barrels. As we use an average of two year old barrels of beer to work with the grapes to begin with, that means that both the combined average time in barrel increases, but perhaps more importantly to the character of the final composition, the average time in the third round of barrels after the refermentation with grapes increases.

The oldest component of this blend spent approximately four years in oak during its first, second and third round of aging. The youngest component is barrel-aged for nearly three years.

You can appreciate this as soon as you open the bottle, in a very good way.

The time was worth it.

We label this as 'blended from three years,' because there were three different years of our beer involved in making it. Perhaps, that's a disservice to the total time, effort and aging involved, but we believe that the beer can fully speak for itself.

It is beautifully complex. The grapes are abundantly there, but have softened and grown into something so much more nuanced and lovely.