Greywacke Marlborough Riesling 2022
This wine has intense aromas of fragrant jasmine, honeydew melon, Granny Smith apples and lemon zest which combine with anise and sweet blossom notes. Silky and textural on the palate with flavours of honeysuckle. citrus peel, and juicy stone fruit. Off-dry with a zesty acidity which drives to the long and elegant finish.
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 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.
Greywacke was created in 2009 by Kevin Judd, an early pioneer in Marlborough winemaking whose ground-breaking wines helped put this small New Zealand region on the world wine map. The name ‘Greywacke’ was adopted by Kevin for his first Marlborough vineyard in Rapaura, nodding to the prevalence of rounded greywacke river stones in the vineyard’s soils. ‘Greywacke’ is a sedimentary rock widely found in Marlborough, consisting of hard grey sandstone and darker mudstone layers.
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