Farfalla 2021 Vermentino McLaren Vale
Crisp, dry white with savoury complexity
Orange peel, grapefruit, floral and savoury
Textured, light, crisp and lingering
Made with seven days on skins and then finished on in old oak barrel
Drink me with oysters and lots of them
90 pts Halliday Cambell Mattinson
“A distinctive wine with pink ginger, banana lolly, citrus blossom and talc characters putting on a show with a difference. It's dry and lively but both the texture and the flavour profile put it out there on its own, in a positive way”
Okay folks. We have to admit that this probably our favourite Vermentino child! We know that you are not meant to have a favourite but this wine turned out so amazing that it’s become our house wine, morning, afternoon and night! The grapes came from the Vasarelli home block vineyard in the McLaren Vale which is higher up than other vineyards in the area and at the bottom of the hill, there is a lake and so when the afternoons start heating up, the vineyard stays cool as the winds bring the cool air up the hill and over the vineyard. This means that the grapes ripen slowly and develop complex characters and lots of interesting flavours whilst also not getting overripe because another of the reasons that this wine is such a good all day drinking wine is because it’s only 11.5% alcohol.
This wine was made 100% on skins. It was an evolution in thought process from the 2019 vintage which was made 50% on skins and 50% in barrel. We had really fallen in love with those skinsy characters and textures and decided to go all out and were so excited by how the wine turned out. So in case you don’t know what we are talking about, normally when you make a white wine, you get the grapes and then press the grapes straight away and ferment just the juice because you don’t want to pick up any flavour, colour or texture from the skins. But we actually want texture in our white wines because we love drinking wine whilst eating grazing on antipasti such as cured meats and cheeses. And if you don’t have enough texture in a wine, when it comes up against proteins in meats and cheeses, the wine can often look a bit flat and flabby. So by fermenting the white grapes on skins, you pick up more texture and structure and so this makes the food and wine matching experience sublime.
Anyway, back to the winemaking, we left the grapes on skins during ferment and plunged them a couple of times a day and then left the skins on the wine post ferment for another few weeks. After this, we pressed the grapes nice and hard and then matured the wine in old French oak barrels to get more savouriness and different flavours from all the different oak barrels that all have their own personality. After a year, we blended them all together, saving some to put into the Octopus blend as well, and bottled the wine as is. No fining, filtration or adjustments.
Read more about the different styles of Vermentino in our blog:
Vermentino Unveiled: It's all about lemon, sea spray and so much more...
