Nose
Amy’s Cabernet Sauvignon has lively dark berry aromas with some cedary oak, rich, powerful cassis and blueberry flavours and firm but fine, ripe tannins.
Palate
It is generous with vibrant fresh fruit lift, softness in the mid-palate, smooth texture and a pleasing grip to finish.
We see the Glenmore vineyard contributing the ripe blueberry and redcurrant notes, generosity of fruit and firm tannins while the Montgomery adds the pretty aromatics, raspberries, violets and darker berry flavours and softer tannins.
Growing Conditions
A consistently warm growing season that fully ripened Cabernet Sauvignon, indeed harvest finished with a rush when a final warm spell hastened the last degrees of sugar. Crop levels were good, flavour development was very even and the resulting wines have good balance and drinkability, not dissimilar to the 2000’s.
Bottling
8/5/2005
Winemaking
The same viticultural and winemaking principles apply to this wine as apply to every other Moss Wood wine. The grapes are monitored as the vines move close to full ripeness and are picked to achieve optimal flavour. There is about a week between picking on the two vineyards with the more northerly Glenmore, naturally, being first. In the winery, fruit from the two vineyards is processed in separate batches. As with the other Moss Wood reds, it is fermented in open tanks and hand plunged four times a day. After fermentation, it is left on skins and tasted to see that the tannins are balanced. At that point, they come off skins and are placed in barrel where they go through malolactic fermentation. After both batches have been through malo, they are racked off and blended.
With The Amy’s, the team at Moss Wood are looking to retain more freshness, primary fruit and softness than in the Moss Wood or Ribbon Vale reds. To achieve this, the wine spends less time in barrels (25% of which is new), but as a result has less tannin and complexity.
