Just a short note to keep you all updated on the 2007 wines and where they are at. 

The Merlot is sleeping quietly in barrel, woken every 3 months to be assembled in tank and then put back into nice clean barrels again.  It is developing beautifully and the aim is to bottle it during late winter 2008.  Should be the best yet!

The wine that seems to be forging a name is the Viognier. The 2007 win spent five months in barrels having been fermented in them.  This is one ‘hell’ of a wine similar in many ways to the very successfull 2004.

At the end of fermentation we achieved an alcohol of 14%+ and having spent the five months on yeast lees, it has developed similar mouthfeel and fullness as the 2004.  I believe it just needs 6 - 12 months in the bottle to show its wares.  Jurg Muggli, the winemaker, is also extremely happy with the result.

I thought I would be bold and show it at the Mt Barker wine show recently and given that it had only been in the bottle a matter of weeks, it picked up a very highly pointed Bronze medal.  Not bad I thought! 

I am expecting great things from this wine.  Only problem is there is not much of it due to the very low yields of the 2007 vintage.  Shall keep you all posted on how it develops.

Vineman

Technorati Tags: Merlot, Viognier, barrels, fermentation, lees

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 25th, 2007 at 9:19 am and is filed under Gherardi Wine. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.