10/16/2024
Welcome to Liz Miller, our West End Wine Manager’s, monthly fusion of wine and music. Before working in wine, she bought and sold used records for a living. Her father was also an independent concert promoter - and it’s because of this that music became her second language. Now she’s using this space in the digital matrix to highlight a few of her favorite bottles and albums, and we hope you’ll discover new faves of your own along the way ☺️
Track 1: David Bowie’s “Low” & Limited Addition’s “Orange Crush”
Post-war Berlin offered Bowie a blank canvas for producing new genre-defying styles of music, while following the lead of kosmische musik pioneers Kraftwerk and Neu! Bree Stock of Limited Addition wines found herself in a similar position in 2014, with the realization that the Willamette Valley was being severely underimagined, underappreciated, and underutilized as a choice region for cool-climate grape production. Bowie and his motley crew of studio musicians created unique layers of sound in the studio, while Limited Addition Wines find themselves working with a multitude of vineyard sites and grape varieties to create layers of texture and ambience in their wines. The interplay of bright acidity mingled with a pungent bouquet of subtropical fruits and florals in Orange Crush offer a bit of tension in the same way that Sound and Vision, a single track on Low, holds back the vocals in order to create tension in its own right. The tracks on side one are fragments in isolation, while side two evolves into a reworking of typical pop pastiche. Ltd. + Wines achieve this through the reworking of classical Burgundian varietals such as pinot gris and pinot blanc, by allowing them to spend some time with their skins during fermentation. The end result being an orange conglomerate of alien-like beauty and intricately refined delicacy akin to the chameleon himself, The Man Who Fell to Earth, David Bowie.
Producer, Tony Visconti, is famous for saying that the pitch-shifting Eventide Harmonizer used to create Low’s unique sound “f**ks with the fabric of time!” I can assure you that drinking a glass of Orange Crush is not too far off from accomplishing the same.
