Our Wines

Brilliantly clear this wine has a golden edge to an otherwise green hued appearance. On the nose there is a complex array of apricots, limes and toffee notes intermingled with subtle clove and dried fruits. The palate is rich and unctuous with a very broad full palate that has abundant sweetness highlighting the dried apricot and concentrated citrus flavours. Sweet but not cloying, the wine finishes clean and pure with a lovely line of fresh, balancing acidity.

Handpicked these grapes are whole bunch pressed overnight with the whole pressing process taking over 12 hours of very gentle pressure to obtain a tiny amount of thick, treacle like juice. This juice was settled at very cold temperatures over 5 days before the Tohu winemaking team racked, warmed and inoculated the clear juice with a carefully selected sauterne yeast. A textbook fermentation followed that allowed the wine to be stopped on balance at just over 11% alcohol and still ample residual sugar. Minimal fining was carried out before the wine was filtered and bottled early to preserve natural carbon dioxide and acidity.

A block of Riesling in our Awatere Valley vineyard was indentified early in the season for this project and intentionally left out to develop the botrytis, or ‘noble rot’ needed for this wine. In the past our vineyard has proven too dry to develop botrytis but this season we managed to encourage some early impact that was blessedly dried out by a week of sunny weather in mid May. Picked on the 25th May 2011 the grapes were all handpicked into small picking bins for transport to the winery in the afternoon. Perfect levels of botrytis were obtained with still some whole berries to aid in the juice production and to help pressing, a notoriously difficult proposition with noble wines. At 35.2 brix the brix were just perfect for a botrytis style wine.