Between Dog and Wolf

Entre chien et loup — between dog and wolf — is the French idiom for dusk: the hour when there is not enough light to tell the tame animal from the wild one. As a name for a Sine Qua Non white it is almost too apt, because the ambiguity is the whole aesthetic of the house.

Manfred and Elaine Krankl founded Sine Qua Non in Ventura in 1994 and built the most deliberately unrepeatable estate in America. No wine is made the same way twice; each release carries a new name and a new label, most of them drawn or designed by Manfred Krankl himself. The system makes every bottle a one-off by construction — there was a 2015 white called Entre Chien et Loup, and there will never be another.

Dirty on Purpose

The blend is 44% Chardonnay, 40% Roussanne, 8% Petit Manseng and 8% Viognier — Bien Nacido fruit alongside the estate’s own Cumulus and Eleven Confessions vineyards. The winemaking reads like a dare: no settling of the juice, fermented as cloudy as it came, never racked, then raised for some nineteen months across concrete eggs, stainless steel, and a large share of new French oak before bottling in the spring of 2017.

On paper that should produce something heavy. In the glass it produces the opposite paradox the name promises — a wine of apricot, pink grapefruit and green mango over candied ginger and honeycomb, full in texture but cut through with a freshness that has no business surviving that much ripeness and that much élevage. The finish runs long and savoury, more spice than fruit. It is a white wine with the structure and intent of a red, drunk at five years old with its tension fully intact.

Dusk, Literally

It was opened in the evening, fittingly, alongside a Krug, an Ornellaia and an Aubert — a table that treated no bottle as a warm-up. The label, a Krankl photograph in black and white, drew more questions than the Champagne did.

Sine Qua Non’s reds get the auction headlines. The whites are the quieter case for the estate: proof that the maximalist method — late picking, wild blends, fearless oak — can land on elegance when the acidity holds. This one held.