sure
so
we try and keep it as simple as
possible we're putting a lot of work
into the vineyards so
 i'm in the vineyards all through the
year on a now and again basis but
once the once the color development
veraison starts happening then we
we take a really keen look
on a daily basis at what's happening
because
generally the rule is in cooler vintages
we experience less tannin in the wines
and hotter vintages
more tannin and obviously more alcohol
so
we need to be sure to to in the hot
advantages we're picking slightly
earlier
and the cooler vintages we're picking
later we can afford to pick later
we're looking for that
you can always call it like an
aha moment where you just
you're tasting these berries every day
and then at some point you start saying
to yourself
um this should you know maybe i should
pick
maybe i shouldn't pick and then
you start to doubt yourself
and that's a sign that you're
very close to optimal ripeness
and i always take my
i've got four jack russells
my pack leader is a guy called
Jackson
he's named after Stonewall
Jackson from the
American civil war
he's got a beard like old
Stonewall Jackson he's one of these
Scottish
jack russell's the beautiful thing but
anyway he's trying to
to taste berries so i bring Jackson
along when things get close
and if he's happy to eat the berries
then we then we're good to go almost you
know it's something like that
some dogs some dogs sniff cocaine at the
airport Jackson eats grapes
you have to keep a close eye on him
yeah yeah the problem is when you eat
lots of grapes every day you know you've
heard about the grape diet
in South Africa it used to be quite
popular the thing about the grape diet
is that
it makes sure that you end up going
visiting the bathroom numerous times
every day so
keeps you regular after you lose weight
anyway so we when Jackson and i
are in agreement we what we'd like to
do is to get the team in as early as
possible it's obviously all hand-picked in the case of the in the case of the
Estate Shiraz
it's literally parcel by parcel we don't
know the analysis
we pick on taste and once it arrives
in the cellar and we crush down then we
start looking at what the analysis is so
every bunch every berry goes across
goes through a French made
mechanical
grape sorting machine
popular Bordeaux and that's has the
ability to separate
a lot of the small little green berries
you get these infantile
they're called shot berries they're this
they're the size of a green pea or
smaller
and obviously if you crunch through them
there's an extremely astringent
and bitter taste to them very
unripe tannins aggressive as anything
and you want to avoid them and this
machine is able to
separate that out we get rid of
the stalks in the case of the
Gravel Hill based minions because stalks
impart tannin
and what we found in the warmer vintages
and
soils with stone you have elevated
levels of tannin
so so if you know that up front you have
to adapt your downstream winemaking
to keep that in mind so what i'm saying
is
parcels from deep clay rich soils like
The Stork
and similar vineyards adjacent vineyards
we
can afford to do pigeage where we
do cap plunging and i visited gigol
in 1994
and he had just installed these
wonderful looking things
which had big pneumatic cylinders on top
of the tank and they were mechanically
plunging down the
skins it was i thought it was the
coolest thing i've ever seen
so i took a few photos and managed to
get a company to
in 97 i installed the first mechanical
cap plunging system in South Africa
and that was made specifically for the
for The Stork venue because
stalk you can punch we punch eight to
ten times a day for 30 days
and it just gets bigger and bigger and
just more rich
and no problem if you
by contrast if you do the same to Gravel
Hill
after 10 days it's so tannic you can't
keep it in your mouth it's quite amazing
you can't believe it's the same grape so
the general rule for the wine is parcels
from stone have what the french call pigeage where
we do
i know please remontage where we do
pump overs
we percolate the juice through the cap
it's a very gentle form of extraction
you don't mechanically
extract you're using liquid to do an
extraction
so that's the big split between the
two the one spends 30 days
up to 25 30 days in the skins any stone
parcel
stone containing parcel not more than
about 10-12 days we need to get off the
skins
and those decisions are made purely
on taste
if we think about it in the really good
wine makers
in cellars all over the world they will
never make any decision
about making wine or moving wine or
whatever without first tasting it's
the taste
result the taste end result
that'll dictate what needs to happen
next and
when when it should happen and how long
and all these things so
so we then press off at that
point
what we're doing when we're pressing
we draw off the free run juice it
goes to a tank
we then start to press lightly
and we press up to just under half a bar
so it's very light pressing that's hived
off to another tank
and then we continue the press to two
bars and it's interesting
generally if you're a student of wine
WSET or whatever they will tell you that
press juice is
is inferior often they'll tell you it's
not
it's not a good component but what we
found is
that the press juices regardless of the
variety
that come from great sites just
are very good quality so we find
sometimes that
we're quite happy let's a good example
is Stork
the final pressings the high pressure
pressings of stalk is pitch black
it's very extractive and we put that
into two or three
new barrel a new wood barrels
and we have a bomb
in the glass you know it's just so
intense and so rich
and sometimes that's what i mean
that's how the CWG offering comes about
so
we have a very open mind it's all blind
tasted
and we don't whatever is the best wine
we can't we don't have hard and fast
rules so
keep we keep an open mind in that sense
oh
complete the wine making sorry the um
so we have we have right now in the
cellar the 2020
Shiraz we have probably about 30
different parcels in different
containers
mostly in barrel lots
and then some in tank too in concrete
tanks
and they've completed their malolactic
fermentation they've had one racking
we've started to have a look at them and
before the end of the year
we'll start looking at assembling a
blend
of the different parcels
we work in a top-down principle so the
the parcels that came from the Gravel
Hill vineyard are blind tasted and we work the
blend
but then we have two or four parcels
left over
and the same for The Stork and we take
those remnant parcels along with one or
two of the other top vineyards
and we then look at assembling Estate
Shiraz and so on and so on
and that's that's essentially hard and
all it's all done by taste
and we do double repeats so we do we
taste
24 hours after making the laboratory
blends
and we taste again a day later
and what we want to see is we want the
majority of the tasters they're three of
us
myself our winemaker Patrick
and the assistant Eloise we'd like
we'd like to see a majority choice
migrate to one
direction and as we get direction we
keep refining the
the blend the percentages get smaller
and smaller eventually we're tasting
two percent four percent six percent
added of a component and you can taste
you can taste two percent difference
so the general rule is
majority rules as long as they're with
me then it's fine
i get two votes
