Nose
Violets, black berries and graphite, with hints of ground coffee and plums.
Palate
Fine boned entry of structured fruit and oak tannin underlying fresh red and blue fruit favours. The finish is pristine, focused and persistent, with yet more floral notes and flavours of cherry glaze and cedar.
Growing Conditions
The 2015 to 2016 vintage season in Margaret River was generally warm and dry up to the third week in January 2016. The relatively dry winter combined with a warmer growing season corresponded to vines achieving good shoot lengths and making the transition from vegetative growth to fruiting growth a little earlier than normal; a great feature for fruit quality. Our dry growing season was quenched on 19th March, 2016 with 50mm of rain, enough to wash the dust off the vine leaves, top up the dry soil profiles and carry the vines through to full ripeness. The resulting wines are fragrant with succulent natural acidities, lovely textures and intense aromatic lift.
Winemaking
The fruit is hand harvested, de-stemmed and crushed, so that each berry is just split. This is to ensure minimal berry degradation during the fermentation process and to promote fresh, clean flavour production by our very specifically selected yeast strain. Our ferments are, by industry standards, cool and gentle, allowing slower, more controlled extraction of tannin and flavour. The wine is pumped over three times a day and then judiciously backed off as the wine develops.
This wine was on skins in the fermenter for 14 days, before gentle pressing and barrelling down. The result is clean, pure fruit flavours, boasting supple yet powerful tannin. The wine was aged in 50% new French barriques for 18 months before the wine was removed from barrels, clarified and bottled.
Aging
Up to 20 years, however we enjoy it for freshness now.
Appearance
Crimson with blue streaks.
