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Tasting Note

Sweet nuts, nashi pears, with some lovely richness. Textured, soft palate with great poise and balance. This wine is beautiful now but developing well for the future.

The challenge with this grape variety is to avoid an overripe and therefore flabby palate, as you chase the pear and blossom characters in late ripening. There is no such issue here. The palate is wonderfully even and long, it has weight and texture without being too big. The lovely natural acidity helps to hold everything together and make the wine both delicious and moreish by itself but also a superb food accompaniment.

Winemaking

The fruit is always lovingly hand picked and then given a light chill at Morning Sun, in order to preserve freshness right up to the moment the juice is coaxed from the grapes in the winery.

Whole bunches were loaded into the press and gently squeezed with minimum agitation. This produces beautiful juice with just a few cloudy solids, an ideal recipe for flavour, complexity and texture. This juice was run directly into barrel (Nothing new but all French) and inoculated for ferment with a variety of different yeasts.

Stirring of the fermenting juice in the latter part of the ferment and after completion both helped the yeast finish the job and added softness and a gentle mealy character to the wine.

After 10 months in barrel the wine was gently fined and filtered before bottling in February 2009.