Octopus 2020 Fiano Riverland

If you like fruity, fresh and light wines with a bit of punch, then try this Fiano. It’s got lots of orchard fruit flavours like peach and pear and nectarine and also some florals. Not white summer florals though, more like heady incense type florals that make you want to dance until you drop.

This one was made partly in tank and partly in barrel. The reason was we wanted to give the wine some lovely freshness through the cooler tank fermentation so that it is a perfect picnic in the park wine in summer. But if you just ferment a wine in tank, it’s too one dimensional and boring and so we also ferment a third of the juice in old French oak barriques. The barrels were too old to impart any flavours but what the barrels did do is allow the ferment to heat up as there was no temperature control, which then blew off some of those upfront primary fruit characters and created these delicious more oxidative secondary fruit characters and savouriness which gave the wine way more character and complexity.

The result is a wine that you can roll around in the park with on or off a blanket, take to a friend’s house for all day garden party or pour yourself a celebration glass at home by yourself for no reason other than you deserve it!