Greywacke Marlborough Riesling 2018

Description

• Off-dry style
• Citrus & apple
• White florals & orange blossom
• Silken texture

"Delicately luscious Riesling with lime, white flowers and ripe apple flavours, plus a suggestion of saline or oyster-shell character. The wine has an appealing roundness and richness, with a silken texture and good sweet-and-sour tension" Bob Campbell, Master of Wine, Real Review, Feb 2020

"Bright, light-yellow colour, with a lightly toasty, lemony bouquet, plus a hint of peach nectar. The sweetness confirms this as a more fruity style, promised by the nose. Juicy, off-dry flavour backed up by very firm, drying acidity that leaves a note of austerity on the aftertaste. It's enhanced by a little phenolic grip. A fuller-flavoured riesling that will taste better with fish and seafood" Huon Hooke, Real Review, Feb 2020

Brightly fragrant lemon-lime citrus notes with Granny Smith apple, orange blossom and a tarragon-like herbal complexity. An invigorating off-dry style that delivers a ying-yang balance of bright, natural acidity and a subliminal touch of sweetness – a creamy palate that finishes with a delicious citrus tang.

Organically farmed grapes were grown at Ashmore Vineyard in Fairhall, adjacent to the mouth of the Brancott Valley, on gravelly clay-loam soils, conditions more typical of the Southern Valleys than the Wairau plains. This 21-year-old organically certified vineyard is trained on a two-cane VSP (vertical shoot positioning) trellis and is rigorously shoot- and fruit-thinned to regulate yield.

The fruit was hand-picked on 29 March at moderate ripeness levels to capture the exuberance and natural acidity of the variety. The grapes were whole-bunch pressed using a very low maceration press cycle and the resulting juice was cold-settled, then racked to fermentation vessels. Half of the juice was inoculated in a stainless-steel tank using cultured yeast and the balance was filled into old French oak barriques, where it was allowed to undergo spontaneous indigenous yeast fermentation. The inoculated batch was transferred to barrel after fermentation and both batches remained in barrel on yeast lees for an average of four months before blending in October 2018. The wine was bottled in November 2018 with a residual sugar of 19.5 g/l, an alcohol of 12.5%, pH 3.05 and acidity 8.1 g/l.