Greywacke, Marlborough Riesling

The fruit for this wine was grown at the organically-farmed Ashmore Vineyard in Fairhall, adjacent to the mouth of the Brancott Valley. The soils are gravelly clay-loam and conditions are more typical of the Southern Valleys than the Wairau plains. The 27-year-old vines are trained on a two cane VSP trellis with careful shoot and bunch thinning carried out to regulate yields.

The winter preceding the 2023 vintage was notably wet, with 220mm of rain in July breaking all records, filling aquifers and providing an excellent resource for the season ahead. Spring conditions were challenging, with warm sunny days, very cold nights and several frosts, including a polar blast in early October. Remarkably all source vineyards emerged unscathed and subsequently an excellent flowering period resulted in healthy crop levels. Early summer was warm but became changeable with intermittent wet spells. Obligingly, the rain dried up by late February and a very settled autumn ensued, providing all varieties with an extended ripening season.

The fruit was hand-picked on the morning of 5th April at moderate ripeness levels, capturing the exuberance and natural acidity of the variety. Following harvest, the grapes underwent whole-bunch pressing using a very gentle, low maceration press cycle, and the resulting juice was cold-settled before being racked to fermentation vessels. The juice was divided equally, with half being inoculated in stainless steel tanks with cultured yeast, while the remainder was put into old French oak barriques for spontaneous indigenous yeast fermentation. As fermentation neared completion, all the wine was transferred to stainless steel where the process was deliberately halted, preserving some residual sugar. The blended wine was then returned to old barrels, where it remained on yeast lees for an additional six months before bottling in late January 2024.