“2022/2023 gave us relatively warm, dry conditions during the winter, kicking off the growing season a little earlier than normal. The December rains made for a challenging middle of the season, but it was good to have the water. A lack of severe heat spikes in the early part of the year meant that we ended up harvesting the Paper Kite block about 8 days later than usual, also because we wanted to push for a little bit more ripeness. Yields were solid and the drier early season meant very small berries which are always good for the winemaker.

Semillon, especially from these old clone vineyards, has come to epitomise what we are seeking in our wines. It provides us with wines of texture and depth, with very little of the overbearing primary fruit aromatics that we see in so many modern clones. We’ve stuck with a very simple, natural formula for vinifying our wines in order to remain true to the vineyards that we work with. The grapes are wholebunch pressed in an old basket press and there are no additions of sulphur dioxide made on the juice. A rough settling follows pressing after which the wines undergo natural alcoholic and malolactic fermentation into a mix of new 500L Austrian barrels and smaller old oak barrels. Semillon has a tendency to become very reductive during maturation so we generally do some racking at the end of fermentation to leave the heaviest lees behind, and have begun to work with a short maturation time in our large, new Austrian oak barrels to balance this tendency. We add some sulphur dioxide late in the winter, and then again at bottling, keeping the level of sulphur dioxide very low in the wine. The wines are bottled without fining and filtration to provide as natural an expression of old vines Semillon as possible.”