Our Wines

Deep garnet red with purple touches this wine has a fragrant and perfumed nose that delivers cherries, red brambly fruits and a marked wild thyme character very typical of our high altitude Awatere Valley vineyard. The palate follows through with a very powerful yet elegantly textured and silky mouthfeel that burst with ripe red berries, complexing forest floor and mushroom notes and some smoky yet restrained oak. Soft and chalky tannins with clean acidity helps give structure and focus to a palate awash in concentrated fruit and lets the wine push through to a long and persistent finish.

Handpicked, the grapes for this wine are very gently destemmed with minimal crushing to maximise whole berries within the ferment. The two blocks were weighed separately but combined in one small open top fermenter where they underwent a short cold soak of around 5 days. As the fermentation started naturally the must was warmed and a proven burgundy yeast was added. Hand plunged up to four days a day at peak ferment temperature the wine was fermented dry within 7 days. Subsequently the wine underwent a long (two week) post ferment maceration on skins until it was pressed direct to barrels for ageing. A mix of new and one to two year old barrels were used with approximately 35% being brand new. Malolactic fermentation occurred naturally during spring and the wine was allowed to mature for another few months before selected barrels are carefully gas racked to tank for a minimal fining with egg whites only, one pass filtration and bottled in mid March 2011.

The grapes for this wine were grown with much aroha on our Awatere Valley vineyard in Marlborough. Spur pruned in winter to minimal bud numbers, for this wine only the 667 clones from two different blocks, Tohu and Rotokaro were selected. Very low yields and great concentration were a hint early on how this wine would evolve and the blocks were targeted for shoot thinning, careful leaf plucking by hand and very accurate and well timed trimming regime. The two blocks for this wine were handpicked in the cool of a perfect autumn day on 23rd April at a brix of 25.9, a pH of 3.45 and a TA of 7.0.