Wine Tasting at Jonathan Edwards

Last week, on a short break from pruning, we went to Jonathan Edwards Winery and brought two of our wines for them to taste and to give us some feedback. We took our 2016 still wine and the 2017 Pét-Nat, a sparkler made in the méthode ancestrale style.
We are still in the label designing phase, so our wines had no label on them. When a wine is presented this way, it is called a "shiner". Initially, I thought that this term was a corruption of the term "moonshiner", but then I learned from reading James Laube's article in Wine Spectator, that shiners are finished, bottled wines that don’t have a label or typically any other identifying feature. They’re called shiners because they are unlabeled and have a “shiny” appearance.
We met with Jonathan Edwards and his winemaker Michael Harney. We first opened up our 2016 still wine. Let me give you a little background on this wine. It is our second vintage. 2016 was a very warm summer, in fact, this was the year that we needed our irrigation in a bad way since we had no rain to speak of from May until we turned on the irrigation in the third week in July. In a word, summer was "hot". This gave the grapes a lot of sunlight to ripen and we had a good amount of sugar, which we measured to be north of 22 Brix. This wine sat on lies (sur lie aging) for almost 10 months since spring and summer of 2017 came and then it was time for another harvest and we needed to free up the kegs that this wine was in. After bottling the wine, we did have Kareem and Charles Massoud of Paumanok give us their feedback. They liked the body that this wine had and picked up on the fact that it had sat on lies. So imagine our surprise (and bewilderment, shock, perplexity) when it tasted very thin! In looking back at our tasting notes on this wine, we did see that on another occasion, it did come off thin or perhaps it was in a "dumb phase". We are still mystified by this.
But, our Pét-Nat was a total surprise. Since the bottling in November, the bubbles had gotten smaller and longer lasting and the bouquet from the sparkler was intensely fruit. It saved the day for us.