First up a confession – we love this wine! Heady aromatics and deliciously sweet, but with enough acid and fine oak tannins to have a sense of freshness inside all this sugar…

The grapes were grown on Carrillo Gantner’s Booroola Vineyard in the Strathbogie Ranges, east of the village of Avenel. We’ve made this super-ripe style for a number of years from Carrillo’s vineyard. It is  remarkable that even in a cool year like 2017 this combination of site and variety will still get extraordinarily ripe.

We picked the raising grapes in mid April at about 20 baume. We normally get around 700 litres of juice from a tonne of white  grapes but this shrivelled and incredibly sweet fruit yields a much lower 450 litres per tonne, and it  takes a long time to press. The high sugar also makes it difficult to initiate ferment so we had to re-inoculate the juice about a week after harvest.

When about half the sugar had been converted to alcohol we chilled the tank and filtered out the yeast, then put this sweet wine to barrel in new French oak hogsheads for 10 months prior to bottling.

Rated ☆☆☆☆☆ Huon Hooke The Real Review