The Small Batch Collection wines are made in miniscule quantities and allow us to explore various winemaking techniques, grape varietals and vineyards. Sometimes it’s about pushing the winemaking boundaries a bit and sometimes it’s all about figuring out the best way to capture the pure essence of a specific vineyard. The lessons we learn when making these wines are applied to our general vineyard and winery strategies.
In relatively warm climates, such as ours, the grapes often don’t have very high acidity levels. We don’t like to add acid to our wines so we need to figure out other ways to do things. With this wine we simply picked the grapes super early (or green) in order to capture high natural acidity.
Vineyards
Made from a single, old bush-vine vineyard planted in 1982. The soil is quite shallow and poor and therefore it’s a low vigour site.
Vinification
Grapes were hand-picked and then whole-bunch pressed. Fermentation took place in a single, old barrel. The wine was bottled after 10 months on the lees. A small Sulphur addition was made prior to bottling.