Winery & Vintage Info
Felton Road farms four properties totalling 34 ha in the Bannockburn sub-region of Central Otago. This wine is from MacMuir vineyard which is just 1 km east of the Elms vineyard and winery, and just 300m west of Calvert. The vineyard possesses a higher vine density, a range of clones and deep heavy silt soils. Meticulous summer management of a single vertical shoot positioned (VSP) canopy ensures even and early fruit maturity. Shoot thinning, shoot positioning, leaf plucking, bunch thinning and harvest are all carried out by hand to ensure optimum quality fruit. Cover crops are planted between rows to assist in vine balance and to improve soil health and general biodiversity.
Spring temperatures and rainfall were normal with only a couple of mild frost events which were successfully fought. Flowering proceeded in warm and relatively stable weather and resulted in setting a normal sized crop across all three varieties. December was warm and dry with these conditions further exacerbated over the next several weeks until a welcome rain event on February 21. With the relatively dry conditions prevailing for the previous months, this event and the periodic rain throughout March (but still only 43mm recorded), did not present any disease pressure issues and provided welcome relief to the warm and somewhat previous stressful conditions. Cooler night temperatures arrested the ripening for slow and steady development. Harvest commenced on March 23, and fears of an early, hot and fast harvest were fortunately not realised.
The unique gravity flow winery enabled the grapes to be gently de-stemmed directly into open-top fermenters without pumping, retaining 25% as whole clusters. Traditional fermentation with a moderately long maceration on skins has extracted good colour and tannin with considerable depth of flavour. This wine was aged for 13 months in 25% new French oak barrels from artisan Burgundian coopers. In accordance with our non-interventionalist approach to winemaking, this wine was fermented with indigenous yeast and malolactic, and was not fined or filtered.
