Winery & Vintage Info
The 2021 vintage was exceptional for growing grapes, so I have been really excited to see the resulting wines and haven’t been disappointed yet. This 2021 Inception Shiraz shows all the hallmarks of a great Heathcote vintage.
Great winter and early spring rain got the vines off to an amazing start. It dried off and got warm all at the ideal time in November making our first fully organic vintage easy to manage. It looked as if it was going to get really hot again but the first heat wave in late December only reached 38 degrees not the 42 forecast and that’s the hottest it got. It remained a coolish and dry summer setting a perfect and large crop. It seemed to take forever to harvest, 8 weeks in total, but the fruit was ripening slowly giving us plenty of time to get things right in the winery. A special vintage that definitely makes up for the previous year’s hardships.
Utilising traditional winemaking practices such as small fermentation tanks, natural fermentation (i.e. no yeast additions) and gravity feeding. Whilst this can be quite labour intensive, Sanguine believe it ensures the preservation of natural fruit flavours and the Heathcote terroir character. As with all varieties produced at Sanguine Estate, the grapes were de-stemmed, lightly crushed and then naturally fermented with wild indigenous yeasts in small open fermenters. The wine is then transferred via gravity (to avoid pump shock) to predominantly French oak barriques (approximately 10% new) and left to mature for approximately 18 months.
