Esk Valley Estate Syrah 2018

The colour is a medium red, vibrant and youthful. It showcases a nose of raspberries and red fruit with peppery undertones. On the palate, the wine is mouth-filling, soft with flavours of red berries, jam, pepper and spice with an underlying acidity providing freshness and length. Delicious as a young wine, it will nevertheless offer excellent cellaring potential.

The grapes for this wine were sourced from a selection of Hawkes Bay vineyards, growing in both river gravels and limestone. The soils are free drained with very little water retention, ideal for growing high-quality grapes. Intensive viticultural practices including shoot and bunch thinning allowed us to harvest perfectly ripened grapes from 12 to 25-year-old vines.

The individual parcels were destemmed on arrival at the winery and transferred to small open-topped concrete fermenters for fermentation. Once active the ferments were managed by hand with hand plunging employed to gently extract colour and tannin. After a period of post-fermentation maceration the grapes were gently pressed and the wine transferred to French oak barrels for 14 months ageing. Both small 228- litre barriques and 500-litre puncheons were utilised, 15% of which were new.