Plantagenet's Great Southern Riesling

The key to Riesling is the temperature (COLD!) and a reductive environment (no oxygen to oxidize fruit character or promote premature ageing).

We start in the vineyard by trying to pick a number of batches, all of which will contribute to a range of characters from minerally, lemon peel and pear characters to lime leaf, subtle grapefruit and perhaps now and then a subtle floral character.

The grapes are harvested at night and processed using an older technique of draining off after a short period of time on skins (15 minutes). This allows the bulk of the skins to rise a little, leaving the majority of the free run juice has been removed and is settled cold with a small amount of fining. Clean juice is racked off after a few days and fermented with 2 known yeast strains over a period of 2 weeks at between 12 - 15 degrees celcius.

Post fermentation, cleaning up and blending happens fairly quickly, ant the result is a young wine that has extremely fresh and crisp acidity, displays all the wonderful characters described above and will age for 10 - 20 years with a wonderfully subtle toasty/honeyed character.