• Off-dry style
• Barrel-fermented
• Pear & apricot
• Creamy texture

Clear and bright appearance, pale straw colour with a nice youthful greenish tinge. Pear and apricot tart-like aromatics with a lashing of vanilla pod, some subtle baking spices at workhere too; cardamom, a dusting of cinnamon and a shake of powdered ginger. Very concentrated mid palate and quite a full bodied and powerful wine. It has density of flavour with a creamy texture and considerable phenolic weight. Probably my favourite feature is the very moreish and quite ‘peachy’ tasting sherbet like acidity. A pretty serious expression of Pinot Gris here, and so it should be! Really ripe fruit, plenty of skin contact and barrel ferment. Delicious now but will certainly develop well over a couple of years.

The 2020/2021 growing season was a stark reminder for many of us in the grape farming community that we deal with a seasonal crop and a vineyard is a business without a roof over it! Mother nature doesn’t care that cold, wet springs are really, really tough on us. One factor which made the previous harvest such a pleasure was the long warm Autumn we experienced during picking. The Indian summer continued through the winter months of June and July withplenty of blue-sky days and little rainfall. Winter did eventually arrive, but it arrived in spring. We battled a record number of frost events and had to deal with persistent cold, wet southerly fronts throughout the key flowering period in late October/early November. Normally flowering takes place over a week or so and ideal conditions are dry with moderate winds. We got the opposite in the extreme.

A good grape farmer will plant and cultivate a diverse array of clones and varieties in part to help negate challenging growing conditions. Different clones/varieties flower at different times, some early, some much later. In any given season there will be clones/varieties which do much better than others and this is normally down to the conditions during the key flowering stage. By having diversity, you can better ensure a consistently good outcome. So goes the theory! Yields across all varieties and all clones were well down in 2021. Pinot clones Abel and 777 fared much better than pretty much all the rest. Our Pinot Meunier, normally areal stalwart, suffered as well. Syrah flowers much later so was largely unaffected. White varieties did a little better but still well down. In the end we were down on yields by around 30-40% ... Ouch! Luckily, for us at least, due to an excellent long and dry ripening period, the quality of what was harvested was outstanding.

Grown over three different blocks at our Blue Rock Vineyard. The most mature block, part of the original vines planted in 1986, tends to ripen earlier and has much smaller berries andcluster sizes, plus the skins tend to have increased levels of flavour and phenolics. This block was destemmed and allowed 24 hours in contact with the skins before gentle pressing and fermentation in seasoned oak barrels.

The other two blocks were harvested and whole bunch pressed together. The juice was run off into a temperature controlled stainless steel tank for a long, cool ferment. Following about 6 months on lees the tank and barrel portions were blended together and gently filtered before bottling in Mid-October 2021.

Food Pairing: Delicious with Chinese five spice pork belly with chilli caramel sauce.