Estate Sauvignon Blanc 2021 - 375ml

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 with plenty 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 a real 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.

A blend of two very different blocks growing on our Blue Rock Vineyard. One block is planted in a very rocky soil the other in a heavier silty clay loam. The block on the rockier soil tends to ripen earlier and more fully, generally showing riper fruit in a more tropical spectrum whilst the other block on the heavier soils tends to exhibit greener, citrus notes. Each block is harvested and vinified separately. The rocky block is sent to seasoned oak barrels for fermentation the other to a temperature controlled stainless steel tank for a long cool ferment. Following lees contact for around 6 months the two batches were combined for a gentle filtration prior to bottling in mid-October 2021.

Perfect with fresh seafood accompanied by a crunchy Asian slaw with ginger and peanut dressing

pH 3.00              

TA 5.5 g/L       

RS 4 g/L              

Alc 13 %

Bottled Oct 2021